Half-Life: Alyx is running directly on Apple Vision Pro with the M5 chip, with no gaming PC attached and no streaming involved. Developer Udi Wertheimer built the port over a weekend, and the game plays on the headset itself.
Justin Ryan posted video of the game running on his own Apple Vision Pro with M5. The clip opens on a launcher with a three-step progress bar for signing in, downloading and playing.
Here’s Half-Life: Alyx running natively on my Apple Vision Pro M5. No PC, no streaming. It’s pretty incredible. https://t.co/ngRpi6SGow
— Justin Ryan (@justinryanio) October 5, 2026
Wertheimer first showed the project this week as a weekend build. He has since linked a sign-up page for an easier install, and that page lists what owners will need.
WEEKEND PROJECT 🥽
what if you could play Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx on the Apple Vision Pro?
without a pc, without streaming, running natively on the headset itself? https://t.co/UoZwqWW8vs
— Udi Wertheimer (@udiWertheimer) October 5, 2026
Valve’s ARM Port and an Open Source Project Made the Build Possible
Valve’s own September 14 update for Steam Frame is the starting point. It ported Half-Life: Alyx to ARM64, added foveated rendering and depth reprojection for standalone play, and tuned the engine without changing any of the game’s content. Apple Vision Pro runs on Apple silicon, which is also ARM.
Wertheimer says he combined Valve’s Linux ARM build with Klepton, an open source project by ShinyQuagsire that runs Android VR apps on Apple Vision Pro. Valve’s port is not an Android APK, though he calls it close enough. Claude filled in the missing pieces, he says, and the rest was optimization work.
On his M5 headset, Wertheimer reports roughly 3K resolution per eye at 60 frames per second, smoothed up to 120. He says that beats how the game ran on his high-end gaming PC when he first played it in 2020. Apple introduced the M5 model in October 2025 with 16GB of unified memory and refresh rates up to 120Hz. The performance numbers come from Wertheimer himself.
Glovebox Promises an Easier Install, but It Needs a $99 Developer Account
Owners reacted quickly, with Wertheimer saying he woke up to a ton of direct messages asking to download the build. He planned to put a guide and tools on GitHub so owners could build it with help from their own AI agents.
He then said he found a way to make installation easy for everyone and pointed to Glovebox, a sign-up page marked as coming soon. The page describes the project as open source and says it is not affiliated with Valve or Apple. It lists no release date.
The Glovebox page lists these requirements.
- An Apple Developer Program membership at $99 a year, paid to Apple
- An Apple Vision Pro
- PlayStation VR2 controllers
- A Mac
- Half-Life: Alyx on Steam
The developer account is there because the game needs more memory than regular apps get, and the page says Apple only unlocks that for developer accounts. The headset itself starts at $3,499 in the US.
I think the hardware is the interesting part here. Valve’s ARM work for Steam Frame carried over to Apple Vision Pro with M5, and a full PC VR game from 2020 now runs on the headset itself. It is also a reminder that Apple Vision Pro is heavier than Meta’s VR glasses, which will be important in a long session of Half-Life: Alyx.
