Quake was released on 22 June 1996 by id Software. Three years after Doom, John Carmack delivered a fully polygonal engine this time: true 3D levels, modelled enemies, precomputed lighting and networking that would give birth to QuakeWorld a few months later. You play "Ranger", sent through an experimental portal to stop an unknown entity code-named Quake, in a gothic, Lovecraftian universe designed by American McGee, Tim Willits, John Romero and Sandy Petersen, over a soundtrack by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails).
Quake's legacy goes far beyond the game itself: online deathmatch, the movement techniques that became a discipline of their own, the QuakeC scripting language that opened the game to modders — Team Fortress came out of it — and the first machinima films. Two official mission packs were published in 1997: Scourge of Armagon (Hipnotic) and Dissolution of Eternity (Rogue).
The engine source code was released under the GPL on 21 December 1999. Recalbox uses TyrQuake, the port by Kevin "Tyrann" Shanahan: a deliberately sober source port that aims at faithfulness to the original behaviour rather than modern effects, and runs effortlessly on the smallest machines.
| Studio | id Software |
| Year of release | 1996 |
| Engine | Quake engine, replayed by TyrQuake |
| Game type | FPS |
| Port licence | GPL-2.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Recalbox ships the Quake shareware episode already installed on this system. See the Included games page.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro tyrquake | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
TyrQuake is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, from the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 to the PC. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake/
Supported extensions: .pak .zip .7z
Just like Doom with its WADs, TyrQuake only provides the engine: the game data lives in .pak files, stored in one subfolder per game. The folder shipped by Recalbox looks like this:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake/
└── id1/
├── pak0.pak ← shareware episode
├── license.txt
└── music/
The id1/ subfolder is the base game. The pak0.pak provided is the shareware version (first episode, Dimension of the Doomed). If you own the full game, copy its pak1.pak next to it: all four episodes then become available. The official mission packs go into their own subfolders:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake/
├── id1/ ← Quake
├── hipnotic/ ← Scourge of Armagon
└── rogue/ ← Dissolution of Eternity
The original soundtrack was on the CD audio tracks. TyrQuake can replay it: rip the tracks to OGG, name them trackXX.ogg using their number on the CD (the first audio track is always 02, track 01 being the data track), and place them in a music/ subfolder of the relevant folder — id1/music/, hipnotic/music/ or rogue/music/.
.zipand.7zarchives are accepted, but each one must contain exactly one file.