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 a 27″ 640×480 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.
As you can see in the video at the top of this story, Quake Arcade Tournament plays a lot like regular Quake. It even had deathmatch, with multiple cabinets being connectable, and apparently included one of Quake 2’s maps. The most noticeable difference comes when random enemies drop gift boxes, complete with a notification saying, “Instaprize!” Apparently Quake Tournament Edition dispensed tokens that could be redeemed for those coveted prizes kept under glass in your local arcade.
You’ll need both MAME and a copy of the quakeat.chd file to make use of the decrypted executable.
Thanks to @Sinoc229 on Twitter for highlighting this story.