You can now play an ultra-rare Quake Arcade Cabinet at home

Since its PC release in 1996, id Tremor has been ported to everything from flip phones and smartphones to game consoles and web browsers. But even many serious fans of the show don’t know Quake Arcade Tournament Edition (Quake ATE), an officially licensed version of the game running on custom arcade cabinets.

Even among those in the know, few got the chance to play it during the brief time it was in the arcades, and the hardware-based DRM built into the cabinet meant the game was not playable on them. home emulators. That state of affairs now looks set to change thanks to the recent release of a Windows executable that can decrypt data emptied from those aging arcade hard drives for playing on a modern home computer.

From PC to arcade

First released in May 1998, Quake ATE featured a custom Quicksilver PC made by a little-known company called Quantum3D. This hardware – running Windows 95 on a super-fast 266 MHz Pentium II with 32MB of RAM – was squeezed into an arcade cabinet with a 27- or 33-inch CRT monitor, seven control buttons and a trackball, all connected to the PC via a special connector called the Quantum3D game control interface. Click on some AVI videos for the attractive mode (which warns players of the coming of “ANIMATED VIOLENCE STRONG”) and software to detect falling pieces, and suddenly your PC shooter is an arcade game.

As shown in the video above, the solo version of ATE plays almost identically to the well-known PC version. The main difference is that enemies sometimes drop backpacks that earn players in-game “coins” (and a shouting “Instaprize!” Announced when you collect them). These coins can cause the game to broadcast prize exchange tickets through an optional printer.

The game also featured what porting company LBE Systems said was “the world’s first multi-player arcade game network, SparkyNET OS.” This system allows multiple cabinets in one location to be connected to a local area network for play to death, including Quake IIThe famous “The Edge” card for good measure.

A preserved rarity

In a statement at the game’s launch, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead said Quake ATE “gives a large number of Tremor gamers have the opportunity to experience the excitement and thrill of playing multiplayer Tremor in the arcades. But that “large number” part turned out to be overkill, as few arcade owners in the late ’90s were willing to shell out for a high-end PC-based cabinet just to deliver. Tremor to their customers.

While cabinetmaker Lazer-Tron has produced a limited series of cabinets specifically designed for the game, Quake ATE was more often seen as a conversion kit stuck in much more janky setups. Even these conversions were not common, however; the International Arcade Museum ranks the game as one of the rarest in members’ collections, with only six copies existing among the nearly 150,000 cabinets followed by nearly 9,000 collectors.

While the 225MB of game data found on those Quantum3D hard drives had been dumped a long time ago, the game itself remained unplayable without a special decryption dongle included with actual arcade hardware. Last month, however, Github user mills5 fixed this with a decryption program that ensures this historical curiosity will be preserved and playable even without a cabinet.

Not that Quake ATE was finally released from his arcade cabinet jail, one has to wonder what other never-emulated classics might soon be playable at home.

List image by Internet Archive