STILL LOADING
Forty years on, the C64 refuses to switch off
Most computers from 1982 are landfill. The Commodore 64 is a scene. People are still writing games for it, still pushing the hardware past what its designers thought possible, and still buying it — in silicon and in software. Here's where the machine lives now.
New games are still shipping
There is a real, commercial market for new C64 games in 2020s. Publishers like Protovision, Poly.Play and RGCD release cartridges and boxed tapes of brand-new titles — polished platformers, shooters and puzzlers built with modern tools but running on original hardware. Annual competitions like the RGCD 16KB Cartridge Game Compo produce a fresh crop every year. The install base never fully went away, and the craft got better.
The demoscene never stopped
The C64 demoscene is the beating heart of it — coders, artists and musicians competing to make the machine do the impossible: more colours than the hardware "allows," sprites where there should be none, stable rasters that shouldn't exist. Parties like Datastorm and X still draw hundreds of people to watch new demos premiere on real hardware. Every year someone finds a new trick in a forty-year-old chip.
The SID chip became an instrument
The SID sound chip — three voices and a filter — turned out to be a genuine musical instrument. Composers like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Jeroen Tel wrote scores in the 1980s that are still performed live by orchestras and chiptune acts today. There's a whole preservation project, the High Voltage SID Collection, archiving over 50,000 tunes.
Hardware you can still buy
- THEC64 — a full-size, working reissue with an HDMI-out and a switchable modern/classic mode.
- FPGA recreations like the MEGA65 and Ultimate 64 — the C64 rebuilt in modern programmable logic, cycle-accurate, with modern ports.
- New peripherals — SD-card drives, RAM expansions, WiFi modems. The machine has better storage now than it ever did in period.
Emulation everywhere
VICE emulates the C64 (and every other Commodore) on basically anything with a CPU, cycle-accurate enough for the demoscene to develop on. Browser-based emulators put the boot screen one click away. The barrier to experiencing the machine has never been lower.
And projects like this one
Retro-64 isn't emulation — it doesn't run C64 code. It's something adjacent: an engine that recreates the feel of C64 platformers natively in the browser, in plain JavaScript, so the mechanics that made those games special can be studied, tuned and built on by anyone with a text editor.
It's part of the same impulse that drives the demoscene and the homebrew market — the conviction that these games were a high point worth understanding, not just nostalgia. The difference is the medium: where a scener pushes the original silicon, Retro-64 rebuilds the design in code you can read and change.
The C64 turned forty in 2022 and had one of its best years in decades. It is, by any reasonable measure, the most alive dead computer in history.