How can I play Quake on OS X 10.7 or above?

Yes there is actually a way to play Quake but you'll need the CD contents of the original Quake (or play a shareware version).

Personally I have only been able to get this to work using GLQuake/Quake provided by that link.

REQUIREMENTS

Intel
Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Quake 1 (shareware or retail version).

You can download shareware quake By ID Software (6.7 MB) here. (which is free)

Steps to install:

  1. install the quake client from here
  2. download the shareware version of quake here
  3. unzip the .sit file (to a known area)
  4. then open up glquake
  5. it will ask you to locate the ID1 folder, find it (it should have PAK0.PAK in it).
  6. It will load if correctly found ID1 folder is selected
  7. Press the green play button
  8. Have fun playing old school quake!

Once you have the original disk and its files, you can choose from a number of modern, maintained Quake clients. From that list, the Mac-native ones are ProQuake+, ProQuake v3.5 (GL), Fitzquake SDL, and Darkplaces.

That page also provides a link to the original, ancient GLQuake, but it's neither modern nor maintained. It'll do the job, but the others are all improvements on GLQuake and will probably serve you better.