Emergency Light Flickers Like Quake

For those of us who played it the late '90s, the original Quake always felt especially creepy in part due to its real-time lighting effects. One might wonder what was actually going on with the in-game lighting shown in the clip below – since faulty LED bulbs hadn’t been invented yet – but the more immediate danger was of course what just advanced when the lights weren’t quite visible.

This on-screen effect, however, apparently wasn’t spooky enough for Rodrigo Feliciano, who referenced the original game’s now-open source code to create his own Quake flicker light. Its lighting pattern is programmed into an Arduino Pro Mini, which uses a transistor to intermittently power up and shut down a modified emergency lighting array.

With a bit of disassembly, and removal of the original battery and circuit board, the light’s housing accommodates the new Arduino hardware inside nicely. Power is now provided by a plug in USB battery, making for a somewhat less convenient, and much scarier emergency lighting unit. Perhaps it’d be useful as a Halloween prop.

Code and schematics for both an Arduino Uno single-LED test unit, and the full emergency LED array setup can be found on GitHub. The demo looks really neat, but note that the flicker lamp isn't linked up with the actual game itself. Maybe that’s a project for another day and/or maker, though I’m not sure you’d want to actually play a game like that in a dark room!