Doom64 and Quake64 Bring PC Legends to the Commodore 64

Doom64 and Quake64 push the Commodore 64 into surprisingly ambitious territory, from changing room heights to a home-built 3D engine.

Two Shooters, One Very Determined Commodore 64

There’s something wonderfully stubborn about seeing a Commodore 64 attempt games that once demanded much more powerful hardware. Just when you think the little 8-bit computer has shown every trick in its book, a developer starts rebuilding Doom и Quake on it. Suddenly, the machine is back in the spotlight, humming away as though 1990s hardware limits were merely a personal challenge.

Developer Kweepa, who recently produced an impressive Wolfenstein 3D demake for the Commodore 64, is now working on two considerably more demanding projects: Doom64 и Quake64. They take very different technical routes, but both are chasing the same appealing idea—bringing the atmosphere and structure of landmark PC shooters to hardware that was never designed for conventional 3D action.

The results are rough, experimental, and sometimes visibly strained. That’s also where much of the charm comes from. This isn’t a smooth modern port pretending the hardware has unlimited muscle. It’s a careful negotiation with every wall, enemy, animation, and frame of movement.

Doom64 Moves Beyond a Flat Wolfenstein-Style World

The first project builds on an earlier experiment. Kweepa had already created a version of Doom for the VIC-20, but that adaptation naturally resembled Wolfenstein 3D more than id Software’s later shooter. The key limitation was architectural: floors and ceilings stayed at a single height.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. In Wolfenstein 3D, every room effectively fits into one flat plane. Doom, by contrast, uses changing floor and ceiling levels to create steps, platforms, raised areas, pits, and more varied spaces. Those height changes help make its environments feel less like connected corridors and more like actual places, even when the underlying geometry remains carefully controlled.

Doom64 tackles that problem directly. Floors and ceilings can change height, bringing the project closer to the spatial behavior of the original Doom. It’s a major step up from simply drawing walls around a flat maze. A room can now have more visual rhythm: a lower section here, a raised platform there, and a ceiling that doesn’t have to sit at one unchanging altitude.

That said, the engine still has a firm boundary. Rooms cannot be stacked on top of one another. In other words, the project can vary vertical height within a space, but it cannot reproduce the fully layered architectural tricks associated with later engine technology. It’s an important limitation, though not an embarrassing one. Even the original id Software engines had their own structural rules, and translating their visual language onto a Commodore 64 requires choosing which ideas survive the trip.

The Hardware Strain Is Part of the Show

The early gameplay demonstrations reveal the unavoidable cost of this ambition. Movement is slow, the frame rate struggles, and the action can look as if the Commodore 64 is carefully considering every individual monster before allowing it to move.

That’s the mild drawback: the game appears playable, but it doesn’t glide. Modern players expect shooters to respond instantly, and even retro enthusiasts can feel the friction when the image updates too slowly. A fast firefight would be a serious test of patience. The technical achievement is clear, but the play experience may not always keep pace with the idea in your head.

Still, my first reaction was harsher than my second. At a glance, the sluggish footage makes Doom64 seem more like a technical demonstration than something you’d actually want to play. Looking again, the essential shape of Doom comes through: enclosed spaces, recognizable combat staging, changing elevations, and that distinct sense of moving through hostile architecture. It may not be fluid, but it isn’t merely drawing a Doom-colored picture either.

That difference is crucial. A demake succeeds when it captures the behavior and mood of its inspiration, not just the famous logo and a few familiar colors. Doom64 appears to understand that distinction.

A Familiar Name With a New Engineering Problem

There’s no confirmed release date for Doom64, so expectations need to remain flexible. Development footage can show a promising direction without telling us how complete the final game will be, how many areas it will contain, or how comfortably the engine will handle extended play.

That uncertainty is worth acknowledging. It’s easy to look at a short demonstration and mentally fill in an entire finished campaign. I’m not sure the available material supports that conclusion yet. What it does show is a technical foundation that has moved beyond the earlier VIC-20 approach and is attempting a more faithful interpretation of Doom’s vertical spaces.

The project can be followed on itch.io, where future progress and demonstrations may make its direction clearer. For now, Doom64 is most interesting as a work in motion: a game that keeps asking how much of a famous shooter can fit inside an old 8-bit machine before the machine starts wheezing audibly.

Quake64 Chooses Wireframe 3D Instead

The second project is even more unexpected. It would have been reasonable to assume that Kweepa might adapt original Quake levels for the technology behind Wolf64 или Doom64. That would still be an impressive task, but it would build on an existing visual approach.

Instead, Quake64 takes the harder-looking route. Kweepa is creating a three-dimensional engine from scratch.

There’s an immediate visual compromise: the geometry is not displayed with filled polygons. Surfaces appear as lines, producing a wireframe presentation rather than the solid, textured environments associated with Quake. It’s a stripped-back look, certainly, but it also makes the technical goal plain. The world is genuinely three-dimensional rather than a clever collection of flat walls and changing colors.

That distinction gives Quake64 a different kind of appeal. Doom64 is focused on pushing a constrained 2.5D-style environment into more convincing vertical spaces. Quake64 is reaching for actual 3D geometry, even if the final image resembles a skeletal blueprint of a shooter. It’s less polished to the eye, but perhaps more startling under the hood.

The wireframe style also creates an odd contrast. Quake is remembered for heavy stone halls, gloomy castles, industrial chambers, and monsters emerging from dark corners. Here, those spaces are reduced to luminous lines and angles. The atmosphere changes completely, yet the underlying movement through a three-dimensional environment remains recognizable.

Weapons, Enemies, and Levels Are Being Rebuilt Too

The project isn’t limited to rendering empty rooms. Kweepa is recreating elements inspired by Quake, including levels, weapons, and enemies, then adapting those components for the Commodore 64.

That means the challenge extends well beyond placing lines on screen. Enemy animation has to be redesigned for a machine with much tighter resources. Weapons need to read clearly despite the sparse visual presentation. Levels must preserve enough of the original spatial identity while working within the new engine’s capabilities.

Animation is especially difficult in a project like this. A creature in a conventional 3D shooter can rely on detailed models, textures, lighting, and smooth motion to communicate its presence. A wireframe enemy has far fewer tools available. Its silhouette, movement, and timing have to do nearly all the work. One misplaced line and the terrifying creature from memory becomes a hostile coat rack.

Level design presents a similar balancing act. The environments need to be recognizable as Quake-inspired spaces, but they can’t simply be copied without considering how the new engine behaves. A design that feels spacious and dramatic on modern hardware might become visually confusing when represented only by outlines.

Surprisingly Decent Motion in a Wireframe World

Despite the scale of the task, the Quake64 demonstrations show a surprisingly respectable frame rate. That may sound like a modest victory, but in a project attempting real 3D on a Commodore 64, motion is the whole argument.

A static wireframe scene would be technically curious but not especially compelling. Once the player can move through it with reasonable responsiveness, the experiment becomes a game. The lines begin to describe distance, corners, elevation, and direction. The image may look bare, yet the sense of navigating a volume in space starts to emerge.

I’m still uncertain how far this approach can go before visual clarity becomes a problem. Wireframe graphics can communicate structure beautifully, but they can also turn busy rooms into a tangle of intersecting lines. The answer will depend on how carefully the levels, enemies, and weapons are arranged. Even so, the fact that the footage maintains a decent rhythm is encouraging.

The project can be followed through itch.io and its GitHub repository. Those two destinations offer a way to watch the experiment develop rather than judging it only by a handful of early glimpses.

Why These Demakes Matter

Neither project needs to pretend that a Commodore 64 can replace the hardware associated with Doom или Quake. That would miss the point. These games are fascinating because they translate famous design ideas through a radically smaller technical vocabulary.

With Doom64, the focus is on preserving recognizable spatial behavior: changing floors, changing ceilings, enclosed combat spaces, and the forward push of a first-person shooter. With Quake64, the focus shifts toward the underlying concept of a real three-dimensional world, even when that world has been reduced to wireframe bones.

They also reveal how much of a game’s identity survives when presentation is removed. Take away textures, smooth animation, and abundant processing power, and you can still find the outline of a weapon, the shape of a room, or the logic of enemy encounters. Sometimes the missing pieces make the surviving ones easier to notice.

That’s why I find these projects more compelling than a simple nostalgia exercise. They aren’t just putting old names on old hardware. They’re asking where the boundary lies between a game’s appearance and its structure—and then leaning over that boundary with a soldering iron in hand.

Conclusion: How Far Can an 8-Bit Demake Go?

Doom64 и Quake64 take separate paths toward the same unlikely destination. One adds meaningful floor and ceiling variation to a constrained shooter engine; the other attempts genuine 3D geometry using a wireframe presentation. Both are visibly limited, but neither feels pointless. The limitations are the story.

I initially saw the slow Doom64 footage as a warning sign, but the more important detail is how much of Doom’s character still survives inside that hesitant movement. Meanwhile, Quake64 may look skeletal, yet its 3D ambition is difficult to dismiss. I can’t say yet whether either project will become a fully satisfying long-form game, but their technical direction is already remarkable.

Would you rather play a slower but more familiar Doom adaptation, or wander through the strange wireframe spaces of Quake64?

ЧАСТО ЗАДАВАЕМЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ

• Что такое Doom64?
  Doom64 is a Commodore 64 demake by Kweepa that aims to recreate the structure and feel of Doom while supporting changes in floor and ceiling height.
• How is Doom64 different from the earlier VIC-20 project?
  The earlier VIC-20 version had flatter spaces that were closer to Wolfenstein 3D. Doom64 improves on that approach by allowing vertical height changes within rooms.
• Can rooms be placed on top of each other in Doom64?
  No. The engine supports changing floor and ceiling heights, but it does not allow stacked rooms or overlapping spaces.
• Что делает Quake64 technically unusual?
  Quake64 is being built around a new three-dimensional engine created from scratch. Its geometry is shown with lines rather than filled polygons, giving it a wireframe appearance.
• Where can development progress be followed?
  Updates for Doom64 are available on itch.io, while Quake64 can be followed on itch.io и GitHub.

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