Let’s Play Quake On an Oscilloscope

Oscilloscope + Nine Inch Nails soundtrack = creepiest game ever.

Thanks to the wonderful folks over at Valve, you can play the 18-years-young shooter Quake anytime you want on Steam. But have you ever played id Software’s famous shooter on an oscilloscope?

YouTube channel Kepuli Games got id’s shooter up and running on a PC connected to a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope, a piece of electric signal monitoring gear normally reserved for displaying testing waveforms on a graph. But this oscilloscope was destined for something greater — making one of the most famous shooters ever even more creepy than its Trent Reznor score already allows.

In this science experiment gone terribly awesome, Quake is running on a modified Darkspaces engine, which then converts images in the game to 96 kHz audio signals. These signals are then displayed on the oscilloscope as some of the most trippy waveform we’ve ever seen.

The end result is a surprisingly playable game. While there’s a bit of a struggle to see doorways and portals, the enemies show up just fine. And since the audio is still coming through standard speakers, you’ll still get the classic shotgun blasts, and Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

Between this, and Doom running on an inkjet printer, you really can play id Software games on anything.

Source: Kepuli Games (YouTube)