Doom Now Runs on a Commodore 64, Because of Course It Does
A programmer has built a working version of Doom for the Commodore 64, adding yet another unlikely machine to the game's ever-growing list of platforms.
One More Platform Checked Off the List
At this point, the question is not whether Doom can run on a given piece of hardware. The question is how long it takes someone to make it happen. According to PC Gamer, the latest answer to that question is the Commodore 64, the beloved 8-bit home computer that first hit shelves back in 1982, roughly a decade before id Software unleashed the original Doom on an unsuspecting world in 1993.
A programmer has built a working build of Doom for the C64, which is a machine that ships with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz MOS 6510 processor. To put that in perspective, the recommended PC specs for Doom in 1993 called for a 486 processor running at 33 MHz and at least 4 MB of RAM. The Commodore 64 has neither of those things. It does, apparently, have Doom now.
What Makes This Particularly Impressive
The Commodore 64 has a devoted hobbyist community that has pushed the hardware well past what anyone expected of it over the decades. Still, getting a first-person shooter from 1993 to run on it is a different kind of challenge. The C64’s graphics hardware, the VIC-II chip, was designed for an era of sprite-based games and colorful side-scrollers. Coaxing anything resembling Doom’s raycasting engine out of it requires genuine ingenuity.
This is not the first time programmers have dragged Doom onto hardware that seems wildly unsuited for it. The game has reportedly been made to run on things like ATM machines, pregnancy tests, and digital cameras, among many others. Each port lands somewhere on a spectrum from “technically impressive” to “why” to “both simultaneously.” The C64 port probably sits comfortably at the intersection of all three.
The Long Tradition of Porting Doom Everywhere
The phenomenon of porting Doom to impractical hardware has its own cultural gravity at this point. Part of it comes down to the fact that id Software released the Doom source code back in 1997, giving programmers a foundation to work from rather than starting from scratch. That opened the door for ports to platforms ranging from the obvious, like Linux and modern consoles, to the genuinely strange.
There is also something specifically appealing about the Commodore 64 as a target. The machine has an enormous nostalgic footprint in Europe especially, but also among older American PC enthusiasts who grew up with it in the 1980s. Getting Doom running on one feels like a collision between two distinct eras of gaming history, a moment when the 8-bit world and the early 3D revolution briefly occupy the same machine.
As reported by PC Gamer, the build is a working one, meaning this is not a theoretical exercise or a pre-rendered demo. Doom actually runs on the Commodore 64. Whether it runs smoothly enough to feel like Doom in any meaningful sense is a separate and possibly generous question, but functionality is its own reward here.
The programmer responsible deserves credit not just for the technical achievement but for keeping alive one of gaming’s most enduring traditions: finding a device that seems completely wrong for Doom, and then proving everyone wrong about that.
Has Doom been ported to the Commodore 64?
Yes, according to PC Gamer, a programmer has created a working build of Doom that runs on the Commodore 64.
Why does Doom get ported to so many unusual devices?
Doom's source code was released publicly by id Software, making it accessible for programmers to adapt to a wide range of hardware, including devices far less powerful than the original target platform.