Quake III Arena was released in December 1999 by id Software. It was a deliberate break: no scripted single-player campaign, no story, nothing but multiplayer arena. The "single-player" mode is a ladder of bots, up to the final boss Xaero. The game came out the same year as Unreal Tournament, with which it shared the spotlight for years.
The id Tech 3 engine was the last major architecture John Carmack designed for the series: OpenGL rendering with scripted shaders, models animated through tag interpolation, Bézier curves for curved surfaces, and above all netcode built for competition. Quake III became the technical foundation of a whole generation of games — Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Star Trek: Voyager — Elite Force — and the playground of the emerging esports scene. The Team Arena expansion followed in late 2000.
The source code was released under the GPL in August 2005, giving birth to ioquake3 and a long line of derivatives. Recalbox uses vitaQuake 3, a libretro port maintained by the Recalbox team.
| Studio | id Software |
| Year of release | 1999 |
| Engine | id Tech 3, replayed by vitaQuake 3 |
| Game type | Multiplayer arena FPS |
| Port licence | GPL-2.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro vitaquake3 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
Quake III Arena is only available on PC (x86_64). The core is not built for any other board: neither RPi3/RPi Zero 2, nor RPi4/400, nor RPi5/500, nor OGA/OGS/RG351, nor RG353. On those machines the system does not appear. For id Software FPS games on a Raspberry Pi, see Doom, Quake and Quake 2.
vitaQuake 3 is the only emulator for this system. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. This core declares no CRT output support.
Unlike the other ports, Recalbox ships no game file for Quake III Arena: the roms folder starts out empty. The system does, however, have a built-in downloader that fetches the official demo and installs it for you.
Open the Quake 3 system menu, then pick DOWNLOAD GAMES. Recalbox downloads the demo archive, extracts it into the roms folder and refreshes the game list. A network connection is required.
This menu entry only exists on systems that have a downloader. It is therefore visible for Quake 3, on PC only.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake 3/
Supported extension: .pk3
From id Tech 3 onwards, game data is no longer stored in .pak files but in .pk3 files — plain renamed ZIP archives containing maps, textures, sounds and scripts. As with Quake and Quake II, they go into one subfolder per game:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Quake 3/
├── baseq3/
│ ├── pak0.pk3
│ ├── pak1.pk3
│ └── …
└── missionpack/ ← Team Arena (optional)
The baseq3/ subfolder is the base game: pak0.pk3 from the original CD, plus pak1.pk3 to pak8.pk3 from the official patches. The Team Arena expansion goes into missionpack/.
Unlike Doom and Quake, this system accepts neither
.zipnor.7z:.pk3files must be dropped in as they are, without being compressed a second time.