The first-person demon-shooter Doom has shocking longevity. The video game has been a part of tech culture since its launch in 1993, with its signature vision of a mirror-focused gun shooting pixelated night fiends becoming an iconic image in sports. Even if you’ve never played, you’ve seen it. That’s not even due to nostalgia, although that is a factor. To some extent, it’s because Doom seems unplayable on anything that has electricity.
This is not new. Doom, in fact, has always been a port. It was developed by id Software for the NeXTcube operating system, but its first release was for IBM PCs running MS-DOS. Less than two years after it was first introduced, it was ported to OS/2, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux and Microsoft Windows.
It was also ported to loads of consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This trend continued for decades, and you can buy Doom on your computer. Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 today, along with PC and, at least for a while, i Nintendo Switch.
That alone is impressive. There have been a number of official ports over the years, and that has undoubtedly helped the game’s longevity. Young gamers can continue to experience the godfather of the first-person shooter genre without having to get hardware and operating systems from the Clinton administration.
It’s the illegal ports where things start to get weird. Doom has become a meme because of the challenge of making it work on anything with pixels — or something close enough. At its I/O developer conference this year, Google developers show the operating system they used the vibe from the beginning Gemini AI — by using Doom on it.
As it turns out, that’s part of a long tradition.
The original SNES version of Doom had an iconic red cartridge, which housed the SuperFX chip needed to run the game on the SNES.
How the Doom meme started
We’re going to use some really cool words in this article that don’t seem like they should be here, like “potato” and “pregnancy test.” However, the game’s descent into madness began innocently enough. The first port that raised eyebrows was that of the Super Nintendo, which was launched in the US in 1991. At the time, the Super Nintendo did not have the hardware to run the game properly, and people believed that running Doom on the Super Nintendo was impossible. The SNES had a 16-bit chip that was too weak to use, so the only hope was a game cartridge containing a SuperFX chip, a coprocessor that helps the SNES process 3D images.
Despite looking almost impossible on paper, a budding Sculpted Software developer named Randy Linden took on the challenge anyway. The game required a large amount of work. In an interview with Gaming Reinvented, Linden revealed his experience with moving the game.
“Development was challenging for several reasons, mainly, there were no plans to develop the SuperFX chip at the time,” Linden said in an interview. “I wrote a complete set of tools — assembler, linker and debugger — before I started on the game itself.”
Linden used a “hacked” StarFox cartridge, as it included the SuperFX chip needed to run Doom on a console, and even custom-wrote his own game engine, which he called the Truth Engine, to make it work.
It wasn’t perfect. The SNES version had five fewer levels than the PC version, no floor or ceiling textures and enemy sprites that weren’t offered before. That means you couldn’t hide from enemies when they were always facing you. No matter, the game was completed with the help of other staff of Recorded Games and launched for the console.
This can’t-do attitude was the first of many such attempts to put Doom into something where it shouldn’t be, and the first real example of popular public sentiment that if you had a screen and a microchip, you could make Doom run.
YouTube creator Equalo wired up a few hundred potatoes to run a TI-84 calculator running Doom.
It only gets weird from here
It took some time before things went wrong. The next big odd port was Texas Instruments’ graphing calculators, especially the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus, in the early 2000s. I was actually there for that, since I had a graphing calculator when I was a teenager and took computer science classes. Learning how to put Doom on a graphing calculator was a very popular after school activity at my school at the time.
The documentation for all the different things that Doom will use is sketched out, so it’s one of those things where if you weren’t there, you might have missed it. In an effort to help round things out, here are some of the craziest things that have used Doom over the years.
Smart electronics: Modern smart devices are more powerful than PCs from the 1990s, so they all have the ability to run Doom. The game is installed in smart refrigerators, pressure cookers, air fryers, toasters and washing machines.
Potatoes: This is a bit misleading. Doom was actually powered by a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator, but that graphing calculator was powered by a few large potatoes cobbled together a la Portal 2.
Pregnancy test: This one is also a bit misleading. Computer developer Foone Turing showed a video of the Doom game in a pregnancy test. This was accomplished by removing the intestines, completely replacing them and using Doom on what was then a small computer that was included in the pregnancy test. It’s still cool!
Volumetric display: My personal favorite is the volume display. Volumetric displays are displays that can show objects in three dimensions, like the holo projector from Star Trek.
The former YouTube creator has created Doom with an excellent volume display, giving the game a true 3D.
E. coli: Yes, we are talking about raw chicken bacteria. Ph.D. A student named Lauren Ramlan created a screen out of bacteria and used it to play Doom. It works on only a few frames per day and can take about six hundred years to complete.
Minecraft: People have done bad things in Minecraft, from ordering pizza to answering the phone. Players also create PCs in the game using Redstone that are powerful enough to use Doom.
Touch Bar for MacBook Pro: The controversial software bar at the top of MacBook Pro laptops was not saved from the meme, as the Touch Bar, in fact, used to play Doom.
PDF file: Here’s the link (PDF), but it only works in Chromium browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. It uses Chromium’s PDF engine to run JavaScript, which is then used to run the game. There are limitations, like all pixels being text characters instead of images, but it works.
Doom itself: A software modeler found a code implementation exploit in Doom 2 that he used to run the original Doom. It actually went pretty well.
Those are just well-known examples. There are dozens of others, including one Twitch streamer who had a bot running Doom based on user input in the chat, allowing the Twitch chat to play Doom live.
Doom came out in the early 1990s and has been optimized for hardware ever since, making it a breeze to run on almost all modern hardware.
Okay, so why Doom?
It seems strange that Doom, of all games, gets the most attention when it comes to ports that have been weirdly modified into strange and unusual pieces of technology. Why don’t other games enjoy this level of meme success?
It’s less complicated than you might expect. The developer, id Software, released the source code to the public for non-profit use in 1997.
“This code only compiles and runs on Linux,” John Carmack, founder of id Software and popular game developer, wrote on the game’s GitHub. “However, the code is very portable, and should be intuitive to display on almost any platform. Send it to your favorite operating system. Have fun.”
John Romero, who created Doom alongside John Carmack, is seen here playing the game alongside other gamers at Milan Games Week 2016.
That’s exactly what people do. They downloaded the free source code and ported it to any silly resource they wanted, essentially making Doom the game people chose to use for everything. The game was released in the early 1990s, back when computers had processors that measured power in MHz instead of today’s GHz. Almost any technology device in circulation today is powerful enough to play this game, even if it doesn’t have as much horsepower as a modern smartphone or gaming PC.
Carmack complains about some things in his GitHub post. Due to copyright restrictions, the Linux version does not include the library. There are code-level errors that Carmack recommends that the developers fix in their versions of the game, referring to some of his original decisions as “really stupid in retrospect.” It’s reasonable to assume that those weren’t top priorities when taking the game to the pregnancy test.
YouTube creator sammyuri has made a Minecraft computer that can play Minecraft, albeit slowly.
Doom is not alone
Doom is a well-known game that is sent to random or nonsensical things, but it is not the only one. There are a number of other games that have seen unusual ports on various devices.
Wolfenstein 3D again An earthquake: Software’s other two first-person shooter games, as well as flagship titles in their own right, have both been released to the open source community over the years. They are ported to all types of devices, including the iPod Classic.
Minecraft: Minecraft is written in Java, and because of that, it has been dismissed by many people. This allowed people to port the game to all sorts of things, including graph calculators. Players also build computers in Minecraft specifically to use Minecraft within it.
Skyrim: The developer Bethesda Game Studios has installed The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim on several platforms and once played by moving the game to refrigerators, Amazon Echo devices and pagers.
Super Mario 64: Modders disassembled the game and posted the results on GitHub. Thanks to these efforts, home-produced ports of the game have appeared for many consoles, including the Nintendo 3DS.
There are other examples, although they tend to stay within the bounds of reason. Half-Life, Diablo, and Portal all have open source efforts that have led to homegrown ports of other game consoles, such as Super Mario 64. Active Google searchers can find many examples of rare and surprising software ports. For example, did you know that a TI-84 calculator can run a Game Boy emulator? Now you do.
Doom is still sitting on top of the mountain as the game mods choose when they move the game to something that shouldn’t really play games. Where will it appear next?