Doom is coming to the Commodore 64 — and it actually looks impressive

Engineer and programmer Steve McCrea is building a working port of Doom for the Commodore 64, the 8-bit home computer discontinued just a year after Doom's original 1993 release. The project is still a work in progress, but recent footage already shows variable lighting, a skybox, and opening doors.

McCrea's C64 Doom isn't a true 3D engine — it uses ray casting on a tile grid, similar in technique to Wolfenstein 3D. But it goes further than a flat maze: the port features variable floor and ceiling heights, elevators, and visible weapons. McCrea says it grew out of code he wrote for The Keep, a first-person dungeon crawler he originally built for the even more limited Commodore VIC-20. Eight levels are already in — E1M1 through E1M8 — and McCrea is currently hunting for a musician to handle the soundtrack.

McCrea isn't a hobbyist tinkerer — he's a professional engineer with credits on several Metroid games and the Resident Evil 4 VR port. The Commodore 64, released in 1982, was a genuine powerhouse for its era but runs on a MOS 6502-family CPU with a fraction of the resources id Software's engine demanded. Getting anything resembling Doom running on it is a serious technical achievement, and it joins a long tradition of Doom being ported to increasingly absurd hardware — vapes, pregnancy tests, ATMs, and oscilloscopes have all run it at this point.

Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, who published Wolfenstein 3D, reacted to the footage on X: "Back when we released Wolf3D I begged Id to make a C-64 version and they said it wasn't possible. Now I'm crying." McCrea is still looking for a musician to complete the project — so if you know your SID chip, now's your moment.