Quake II was released in December 1997 by id Software and published by Activision. Despite its title, it has no story connection with Quake: you play a marine from operation Alien Overlord, dropped on the planet of the Strogg — a cybernetic race that recycles human prisoners into war machines — with orders to fight your way to their capital and kill their ruler.
Technically, the game introduced id Tech 2: hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering by default, coloured lighting, more detailed models, and above all a campaign built as connected units rather than isolated levels, with objectives sending you back and forth between maps. The industrial soundtrack is by Sonic Mayhem. Two official mission packs followed: The Reckoning (Xatrix, 1998) and Ground Zero (Rogue, 1998).
The source code was released under the GPL in December 2001, spawning a long line of source ports. Recalbox uses vitaQuake 2, originally a PlayStation Vita port later turned into a libretro core.
| Studio | id Software |
| Year of release | 1997 |
| Engine | id Tech 2, replayed by vitaQuake 2 |
| Game type | FPS |
| Port licence | GPL-2.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Recalbox ships the official Quake II demo (version 3.14, three levels) 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 vitaquake2 | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Quake II is not available on RPi3 or RPi Zero 2: the core is not built for them. On those machines, fall back on Quake, which runs everywhere.
vitaQuake 2 is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on the machines where it is available. 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 2/
Supported extensions: .pak .zip .7z
As with Quake, the engine provides no game data: that data lives in .pak files stored in one subfolder per game. The folder shipped by Recalbox looks like this:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake 2/
├── baseq2/
│ ├── pak0.pak ← official demo (three levels)
│ └── players/
├── license.txt
└── release.txt
The baseq2/ subfolder is the base game. The pak0.pak provided is the demo one: it only contains three levels and accepts no add-on content. If you own the full game, replace it with the pak0.pak, pak1.pak and pak2.pak from your CD. The official mission packs go into their own subfolders:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake 2/
├── baseq2/ ← Quake II
├── xatrix/ ← The Reckoning
└── rogue/ ← Ground Zero
.zipand.7zarchives are accepted, but each one must contain exactly one file.