Abstract The classification of irreducible, spherical characters of the infinite-dimensional unitary/orthogonal/symplectic groups can be obtained by finding all possible limits of normalized, irreducible characters of the corresponding finite-dimensional groups, as the rank tends to infinity. We solve a q-deformed version of the latter problem for orthogonal and symplectic groups, extending previously known results for the unitary group. The proof is based on novel determinantal and double-contour integral formulas for the q-specialized characters.