‘Doom’ Runs on Bitcoin, Dogecoin and ChatGPT—And Now in PDFs Too

It’s become a meme to find out whether classic video game Doom can be played on nearly any kind of device or platform—and a popular file format is the latest in this long line.

Crypto bros have gotten the seminal shooter running on Bitcoin as well as Dogecoin via its NFT-like protocols, respectively named Ordinals and Doginals, while students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) theorized that it could even run using gut bacteria.

Now, a purported high school student going by the name Ading2210 on GitHub has made it possible for anyone to play Doom in a portable document format, usually referred to as a PDF. Players can simply open the game within their Chromium-based browser—Google Chrome, Brave Browser, etc.—and play either using in-document buttons or keyboard controls.

Admittedly, it’s a bit janky. The game plays, but with a heavily pixelated monochrome image and no sound. But it’s more about the feat of playing Doom within a PDF document, rather than PDFs being the next frontier of gaming. In other words, it’s unlikely that anyone will want to play Doom via a PDF, but now we know it’s possible.

This has long been a running joke and technical challenge with the iconic 1993 first-person shooter. In 1997, developer id Software made Doom open-source, which turned the game into a favorite for experimentation by fans and hobbyists.

Over the years, developers have managed to get Doom up and running on cash ATMs, lawn mowers, pregnancy tests, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, ChatGPT, and now PDFs. That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. In fact, there’s a Reddit community dedicated to this exact cause called r/ItRunsDoom with over 100,000 members.

On this subreddit, our apparent Doom PDF creator proudly posted his creation, explaining how he did it. Put simply, he discovered that PDFs support Javascript and that old versions of code compiler Emscripten can convert game code to work in that system, so long as he used a dumbed-down version of the game.

While the subreddit loved it, the post is still far away from the community’s favorite post of all time. Currently in the top spot is Doom running in Minecraft, with other creations ahead such as Doom on an iPod, ticket validator, and a vape—we really could go on forever.

Edited by Andrew Hayward