Based on work they have done porting the Quake 3 engine to the Apple iPhone and iPod touch, HermitWorks in Grand Prairie, Alberta, Canada hopes to release their game, Space Trader, in time for the iPhone 2.0 rollout in June. The only obstacle now is Apple.

On Tuesday, iPO reported that Scott Brooks at HermitWorks in Canada has successfully ported Quake 3 to the iPod touch. iPO had a chance to chat with Scott Brooks, and he provided some additional background on the project.

It turns out that the Quake 3 engine itself is licensed under the GPL, so its possible for HermitWorks to add their own content to the project and charge for the new content, namely the Space Trader game built on top of the engine. The initial port only took 12 hours, Mr. Brooks said, a credit to the quality of the Quake 3 engine.

The plan was to release Space Traders in time for the launch of the Apple AppStore. However, there’s been a snag. HermitWorks was not approved by Apple as an iPhone game developer. So Scott went about porting the game using an unofficial SDK, the same one used to build Labyrinth.

The reason is that while anyone can download the SDK, the SDK builds a simulator within which the app must run. The catch is that the simulator doesn’t have the OpenGL graphics access that’s required for a fast game. So, no approval, no OpenGL graphics for a final, released game.

Mr. Brooks is hoping that the demos he built and the newly released video in his blog on Wednesday will get Apple’s attention, and his company will finally be approved by Apple to deliver Space Trader.

Now, he’s waiting for that e-mail.