you can now play quake the arcade version on pc.

You can now play the quake arcade tournament version on pc

The arcade version of Quake is finally playable on PC

In 1998 a company called Lazer-Tron released Quake Arcade Tournament, a full-sized upright cabinet version of id's shooter that apparently came with a 27" 640x480 VGA display, a trackball for mouselook, and seven buttons for directional movement, shooting, jumping, and cycling through weapons.

As this blog about Quake Arcade describes, "It ran on a custom PC known as the Quantum3D Quicksilver Arcade PC. While that may sound impressive, this was 1998 and in reality it was only a 266 MHz Pentium II running under Windows 95!!"

A limited number of Quake Arcade Tournament cabinets were made, and while a copy of the software has been available online for years, the emulator MAME wasn't able to run it. The arcade cabinet came with copy protection in the form of a dongle that needed to be plugged in for it to run, copy protection that finally defeated this year by GitHub user mills5, who uploaded a decrypted executable.

Quake Arcade tournament edition is a port of Quake for arcade machines developed by Id Software in conjunction with Lazer-Tron, The game port is little different from standard Quake. The game simulates a deathmatch round (with the addition of monsters), several cabinets can be linked together for group play. The levels available were not exactly the same as the ones on the Quake CDROM (most notably the famous Quake 2 map "The Edge" was in this game as well).

Some monsters would drop prize packs when shot (this would dispense tickets out of the machine, as this was also a redemption machine). Finally, the weapon lineup was not exactly the same (more of a hybrid of the weapon selection from both Quake and Quake II).

Inside the cabinet was a standard AMD (or Intel as they weren't all the same) computer with a Quantum 3D video card. No JAMMA boards or anything like that at all. There was even a keyboard and mouse inside the cabinet. That would have made for the perfect general gaming machine (the machines could run more than just Quake, as they were normal computers).

There were only twenty of these machines ever produced. The game was in its final test phase (with machines on location in several places), when a contract programmer quit. No one ever finished the project. The ones that were made did not all survive, although some are still around. They would have been $7500 each if they had even been released for wide consumption. So you may never see one of these, but you could certainly build a clone rather cheaply.

Huh?... QUAKE Arcade Tournament Edition !?!... What is this all about you ask?

Well, this blog is really just a work in progress at the moment.

As it grows, I am going to attempt to create a sort of historical record for this very short-lived commercial ARCADE game from 1998.

Many are not even aware of the existence of such a thing and many don't even believe there ever was a special edition of QUAKE specifically made for commercial Arcade play.

The game was housed in a full-sized upright arcade cabinet with a 27" 640x480 VGA display screen and a custom Trackball controller setup with 7 separate action buttons. It ran on a custom PC known as the Quantum3D Quicksilver Arcade PC. While that may sound impressive, this was 1998 and in reality, it was only a 266 MHz Pentium II running under Windows 95!! However, with its custom graphics card setup, it was pretty high end for the time... especially in an Arcade cabinet. The setup also contained a proprietary I/O card known as the Quantum3D Game Control Interface or GCI.

This game is noted (on KLOV and other lists) as being one of the RAREST Arcade games ever created. Hence, there is a large number of people that believe this is some kind of hoax and that it NEVER existed, or that it never made it past the prototyping stage.

The rumour also claims that there were only 20 working cabinets ever manufactured. However, this appears to be completely false in that there are countless accounts of this game having been seen and played all over North America over the years. What this rumour does NOT take into account is that the game was actually marketed for the most part as a RETRO CONVERSION KIT for commercial arcade owners who already were in possession of useable cabinets and parts to complete a Quake Arcade Tournament Edition installation.

I believe the reason that the rumour began is that the Laser-Tron partnership (see posts on the custom cabinet below) was in fact VERY SHORT-LIVED. What many failed to realize though is that the Laser-Tron fully complete cabinet ($7,500 in 1998 dollars) was only 1 of 3 ways that the game was being marketed to arcade owners. Yes, the white Lazer-Tron cabinet is in fact very rare, but the game itself actually got out there, mainly as a retro conversion kit from LBE Systems & Opus Entertainment. However, given that we are now talking about 1998, it might as well have been a lifetime ago,.... and memories fade..... and cabinets and original parts end up crushed, in landfills, or gathering layers of dust in basements and storage units.

Taking an educated guess, I think that probably a couple hundred of these units (in CONVERSION KIT form) made it out across North America back in the day. So, YES it is STILL a very rare Arcade game... whether the real number is 20 or 200.