This Commodore 64 Doom port has working elevators, doors, and weapons — all on 44-year-old hardware

Published Jul 30, 2026, 2:36 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account You know the long-running joke that Doom can run on anything, including gut bacteria and a pregnancy test? Continuing that trend, someone managed to get the first-person shooter classic running on the Commodore 64, a popular home 8-bit computer that released back in 1982. Engineer and programmer Steve McCrea, who has worked on several Metroid games and Resident Evil 4's virtual reality port, pulled the project together. According to a post from McCrea on Twitter, the Commodore 64 Doom port is based on code from The Keep, a first-person dungeon he developed for the Commodore VIC-20, a predecessor to the Commodore 64 with lesser specs. Getting the first-person shooter running on this ancient hardware is an impressive feat The visuals are more than a bit primitive, though In his X post, McCrea says that he wrote his C64 version of Doom "using ray casting in a tile grid." The port even features different floor and ceiling heights and elevators. Other key features include the ability to open doors and see weapons, all gameplay elements The Keep doesn't offer. There are even several sound effects, including a pistol shooting (it sounds more like a frog than a gun, though), and a sky box. So far, McCrea has only built Doom levels E1M1 through to E1M8. As impressive as the work-in-progress port is, it still looks like a bit of a mess given the Commodore 64's limitations. Still, as someone who spent a lot of time with the Commodore 64 growing up, it's wild to see a first-person shooter running on the positively ancient hardware, even if it is difficult to actually tell what's going on in the game at times. The 44-year-old Commodore 64 is the best-selling single computer model ever released, with sales estimated at 12.5 to 17 million. The affordable home computer is best known for games like The Bard's Tale and Maniac Mansion, along with the wide range of accessories it's compatible with, including disk drives, printers, and joysticks.