DOOM Has Become The Centerpiece Of A Wild Technological Arms Race

When DOOM was released in 1993, it required an IBM or compatible 386 computer, 4 MB of RAM, and 24 MB of hard disk drive space. The family PC you kept in the fabled computer room may not have been able to run it. Today, though, you can run DOOM on your phone, through your internet browser, on an Apple MacBook TouchBar, a TI graphing calculator, a pregnancy test, an ATM, and almost anything else you can imagine.

Since DOOM’s debut, programmers and designers have been obsessed with modifying the revolutionary first-person shooter and porting it to new platforms. In recent years, those ports have become far more ambitious and far more… weird.

“[DOOM] captivated thousands of people to the extent that some players wanted to add more to the game or learn how it ticks,” says Zach Volchak, creator and owner of CanItRunDoom.org, a site dedicated to compiling the various platforms people have gotten DOOM to run on. “The weird devices that can run DOOM are just a natural evolution of the porting community.”

“Natural” seems like an odd way to describe DOOM running on a (fake) candy bar, but the technique behind these ports really hasn’t changed much over the years. DOOM was built with basic C programming language and quite a lot of smoke and mirrors. When Id Software made DOOM’s source code public in 1997, programmers quickly realized how versatile that simple code was. Once everyday devices became more powerful than 1993’s best computers, the race to run DOOM on everything was on.

Why DOOM, Why Now

But that only helps answer the “How?” question you’ve probably asked if you’ve ever seen a video of DOOM running on, say, a digital camera. As such ports become more common, the more pressing question seems to be “Why?” Programmers may see this as a challenge, but how did this movement go from a curiosity to a phenomenon?

The answer is fairly obvious, really: “I think it's a mix of DOOM being a cultural milestone in gaming and the source code being released,” explains Ólafur Waage, a programmer who helped the European Space Agency get DOOM to run on the ESA’s OPS-SAT satellite. “We have plenty of examples of one but not the other, so the combination here is the key.”

DOOM has become a kind of shorthand that allows us to understand both these programming achievements and the power of the humblest modern devices. That’s an asset at a time when less obvious technological innovations make it difficult to appreciate our progress.

Think about the average commercial airplane. At a glance, it doesn’t look like they’ve changed much in the last 80 years or so. In reality, that glance doesn’t reveal the numerous, largely invisible innovations that have made them faster, more efficient, and safer. Even modern game developers sometimes struggle to express just how impressive their creations are.

“When you have the most technologically advanced consoles, every released game is an amazing achievement,” Waage theorizes. “It’s harder for a non-developer to appreciate the number of things going on when they look at a field full of robots in Horizon. But seeing DOOM running on a weird device is something people can connect the dots on.”

In other words, our attraction to these unusual DOOM ports may be rooted in our desire to look at the world and see obvious, undeniable signs of progress. In gaming, it seems like the rise in discussions about things like framerates and ray-tracing is proportional to our inability to just point at a new game, say “Look at that,” and let first impressions do the talking. With these DOOM ports, we seem to have found this powerful way to convey how impressive most modern technology really is. It’s easy to take a graphing calculator or wireless printer for granted until you see it running DOOM.

The DOOM-opticon

Then again, there is a theory that our fascination with DOOM is based on fear of that technology. As more devices become connected to the internet, and more of that internet is tracking us, collecting our data, or run by AI, it’s easy to be paranoid by the screens all around us. When we run DOOM on those screens, it may be a reminder that we are indeed surrounded.

Yet, there is seemingly no advancement in the field of DOOM ports which does not spark joy. Maybe that’s because we’re talking about harmless old tech running on modern devices. Or, maybe it has something to do with the fact that none of these devices were ever meant to run DOOM until a person in control of them made it happen.

“It’s a way of clawing back control,” Waage suggests. “[People say] ‘I don't understand all of these things that are required with all of the new tech stuff that I use.’ Then someone runs DOOM on it and people connect more. It's just a computer. It's a CPU, there is a hard drive somewhere, there is RAM. It can run these sequences of events one after another.”

DOOM helps us trace a clear line between the comforts of the past and the new. It reminds us that there is no new piece of technology so impressive and potentially frightening that it can’t be made to run DOOM. As the “Can It Run DOOM?” meme continues to gain momentum, it almost feels separated from concerns about the future of gaming and technology. As time goes on, that seems to be one of these projects’ biggest draws.

“Porting DOOM is a tradition outside of industry trends and concerns,” Volchak believes. “You could even argue that tradition is not really about games as a whole. DOOM just happened to be the game that created a community that was able to make headlines doing what they are passionate about.”

The future can be frightening. It is often defined by our concern that we will run out of tomorrows that are better than our yesterdays. Yet, thanks to those who dedicate their talent to getting DOOM to run in the strangest places imaginable, we can rest assured that whatever may come, it will probably run DOOM.