Quake Now Runs on the Atari 8-Bit, Five Days After Kweepa Fit It on the Commodore 64 as Wireframe Rooms and Stick-Figure Monsters

Chris, joystick in hand, leans toward a small CRT showing a green wireframe corridor and a stick-figure monster, beside a beige home computer. — Illustration: LockerGnome

@Kweepa's post on X

“Quake for Atari 8-bit now available!” Kweepa wrote on X at 17 UTC on October 23, two minutes after he updated the game’s page. The Commodore 64 version went up five days earlier, on October 18, in a devlog that calls it “a demake of the classic 1996 fps for the Commodore 64/Atari 8-bit.”

The page is plain about the trade. Of his three id ports, “this one has the most cuts to functionality, but I have full 3d wireframe levels, rendered like Mercenary’s underground bases, one room at a time.” He mapped all of E1M1 through E1M7 in a level editor he wrote for the project, and that “was the long pole of the development.” First he had to add rooms in different shapes, “based on tetris pieces,” and smooth out the editor “so I didn’t feel like tearing my hair out when mapping.”

The monsters came out of Quake itself. He “extracted the enemy animations and converted them to skeletons using a vertex binding approach. The enemies look like stick figures.” The weapons took a stranger route: he converted them to quads “using a greedy merge, then rendering with a z buffer and face id buffer,” which got him “some sprites that look like wireframe weapons.” When a player asked in August whether the gun could be hidden to free up CPU, he answered: “The gun is just sprites. Looks like I fooled you! :)”

Some of Quake didn’t make the trip. “One thing that had to be cut was the underwater stuff, both for design and code size. Maybe next time!” Music plays only in the menus, so in game the C64’s three sound voices split the work: “player/weapon sounds on voice 1, enemy sounds on voice 2, and doors and elevators on the noise channel.” The devlog puts the frame rate at “3-12 fps, generally above 5 except for the end boss.”

The C64 disk image is 170 kB, there’s an Easyflash cartridge build at 160 kB that a player asked for to skip the loading, and the Atari disk is 130 kB. The page marks the code “AI Assisted” and credits Michael Kircher for the line drawing, Mandy Kane for the music, Krill/Plush for the fast loader, Chris Masiero for wiring it in, and Paul Docherty for the title screen.

Why it matters

The look is the budget. Wireframe is what a 1 MHz machine can afford, and Kweepa leaned into a 1980s reference instead of hiding from it. Mercenary drew its underground bases the same way, one room at a time. A player in the comments said the rendering reminded him of “Star Wars (1983) and Battle Zone (1980).”

The hard part was the maps, not the engine. Seven levels had to be rebuilt by hand in shapes a C64 can draw, which is why the editor got a rework before the mapping started.

The gun is a magic trick. The one thing on screen that looks like real-time 3D is a set of sprites pre-rendered from Quake’s own models. It fooled at least one player, who asked whether hiding it would speed the game up.

Third time, shared code. The weapon and enemy behaviour is “cribbed from Wolf64 and Doom64, tempered by the unique requirements of Quake.” Each port paid for the next.

Kweepa says this one has the most cuts of the three, and he lists them. That candor is a feature: a port that tells you what it dropped (the water, the in-game music) is easier to trust than one that promises everything. He’s already turning down requests, too. Asked for filled vectors on the newer C64 hardware, he replied, “The beauty of an open source project is that anyone can do this. Which is my way of saying I’m not interested in doing this :)”

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