If It Has a Screen, It Can Run Doom. How a Game From 1993 Became a Porting Legend

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The first-person demon-shooting Doom has some shocking longevity. The video game has been part of tech culture since it launched in 1993, with its signature view of a gun centered of the screen firing at nightmarish pixelated fiends becoming an iconic image in gaming. Even if you've never played, you've seen it. That isn't even necessarily because of nostalgia, although that's a factor. To some extent, it's because Doom can seemingly be played on anything with electricity running through it.

This isn't new. Doom has, essentially, always been a port. It was developed by id Software on a NeXTcube workstation, but its first release was to IBM PCs running MS-DOS. Less than two years after its initial launch, it was ported to OS/2, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux and Microsoft Windows.

It was also ported to a load of consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This trend continued for literally decades, and you can buy Doom on your Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 today, along with PC and, at least for a while, the Nintendo Switch.

That alone is impressive. There have been dozens of official ports over the years, and that has no doubt helped the game's longevity. Younger gamers can continue to experience the godfather of the first-person shooter genre without having to unearth hardware and operating systems from the Clinton administration.

It's with the unofficial ports that things start to get weird. Doom has become a meme thanks to the challenge of getting it to run on anything with pixels -- or something close enough. At its I/O developer conference this year, Google engineers showed off an operating system they vibe-coded from scratch using Gemini AI -- by running Doom on it.

As it turns out, that's part of a long tradition.

A red Doom SNES cartridge against a black background.

How the Doom meme started

We're going to use some really fun words in this article that don't seem like they should be here, such as "potato" and "pregnancy test." However, the game's descent into porting madness began innocently enough. The first port that raised eyebrows was to the Super Nintendo, which launched in the US in 1991. At the time, the Super Nintendo lacked the hardware to properly run the game, and folks believed that running Doom on the Super Nintendo was impossible. The SNES had a 16-bit chip that was far too weak to run it, so the only hope was a game cartridge containing a SuperFX chip, a coprocessor that assisted the SNES in processing 3D graphics.

Despite looking nearly impossible on paper, an enterprising developer for Sculptured Software named Randy Linden undertook the challenge anyway. The game required a significant amount of work. In an interview with Gaming Reinvented, Linden outlined his experience porting the game.

"The development was challenging for a few reasons, notably, there were no development systems for the SuperFX chip at the time," Linden said in the interview. "I wrote a complete set of tools -- assembler, linker and debugger -- before I could even start on the game itself."

Linden used a "hacked-up" StarFox cartridge, since it included the SuperFX chip necessary to run Doom on a console, and even custom-wrote his own game engine, which he dubbed the Reality 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 could only be rendered from the front. That means you couldn't sneak up on enemies since they were always facing you. Regardless, the game was completed with the help of other Sculptured Games employees and launched for the console.

This can-do attitude was the first of many such attempts to port Doom onto something where it shouldn't be, and is the first real example of the popular community sentiment that if it has a screen and a microchip, it can be made to run Doom.

Doom on a TI-84 calculator being powered by potatoes

It only gets weirder from here

It took some time before things went off the rails. The next major weird port was to Texas Instruments graphing calculators, specifically the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus, in the early 2000s. I was actually there for that one, since I had a graphing calculator as a teenager and took computer science classes. Learning how to install Doom on the graphing calculator was a fairly popular mid-class slacking off activity in my school at the time.

The documentation for all the various things to run Doom is pretty sketchy, so it's one of those things where if you weren't there, you may have missed it. In an effort to help piece things together, here are several more ridiculous things that have run Doom over the years.

Smart appliances: Modern smart appliances are much more powerful than PCs from the 1990s, so basically all of them have the capacity to run Doom. The game has been installed on smart fridges, pressure cookers, air fryers, toasters and washers.

Potatoes: This is a tad misleading. Doom actually ran on a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator, but that graphing calculator was powered by several hundred potatoes rigged together a la Portal 2.

Pregnancy test: This one is also a bit misleading. Hardware modder Foone Turing showed off a video of Doom gameplay on a pregnancy test. This was accomplished by tearing out the guts, replacing them entirely and running Doom on what was essentially a little computer stuffed into the pregnancy test. Still cool!

A volumetric display: My personal favorite is the volumetric display. Volumetric displays are displays that can display things in three dimensions, such as a holo projector from Star Trek.

E. coli: Yep, we're talking about the germs on uncooked chicken. A Ph.D. student named Lauren Ramlan created a screen out of bacteria and then, of course, used it to play Doom. It runs at only a few frames per day and would take approximately six centuries to complete.

Minecraft: People have done some wild things in Minecraft, from ordering a pizza to accepting a phone call. Players have also built PCs in the game using Redstone strong enough to run Doom.

The MacBook Pro Touch Bar: The controversial software bar at the top of MacBook Pro laptops was not spared from the meme, as the Touch Bar was, in fact, used to play Doom.

A PDF file: Here's the link (PDF), but it only works in Chromium browsers such as 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, such as all the pixels being text characters instead of graphics, but it works.

Doom itself: A software modder figured out a code execution exploit in Doom 2 that he used to run the original Doom. It actually ran pretty well.

Those are just the well-known examples. There are dozens of others, including one Twitch streamer who had a bot that ran Doom based on user inputs from the chat, allowing a Twitch chat to play Doom live.

A Doom screenshot showing an enemy being blown away.

Okay, so why Doom?

It seems a little odd that Doom, of all games, is the one that gets all the attention when it comes to weirdly modified ports to strange and unusual pieces of tech. Why don't other games enjoy this level of meme success?

It is far less complicated than you might expect. The developer, id Software, released the source code to the public for nonprofit use in 1997.

"This code only compiles and runs on Linux," John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and legendary game developer, wrote on the game's GitHub. "Still, the code is quite portable, and it should be straightforward to bring it up on just about any platform. Port it to your favorite operating system. Have fun."

John Romero, a man with a headset on and a Coke Zero in front of him, smiles while looking at a computer monitor.

That is precisely what people did. They downloaded the completely free source code and ported it to whatever ridiculous device they wanted, essentially making Doom the game that people chose to run on everything. The game was released in the early 1990s, back when computers had processors that measured power in MHz instead of today's GHz. Virtually any tech device in circulation today is strong enough to play this game, even if it doesn't have nearly as much horsepower as a modern smartphone or gaming PC.

Carmack does lament some things in his GitHub post. Due to copyright constraints, the Linux version doesn't include the sound library. There are code-level mistakes that Carmack recommends developers fix in their own versions of the game, referring to some of his original decisions as "downright silly in retrospect." It's reasonable to assume those weren't high priorities when porting the game to a pregnancy test.

A display in Minecraft that is playing Minecraft.

Doom isn't alone

Doom is definitely the most well-known game that gets ported to random or absurd things, but it's not the only one. There are a handful of other games that've seen some strange ports to various devices as well.

Wolfenstein 3D and Quake: Two more id Software first-person shooter games, and groundbreaking titles in their own right, both of which were released to the open source community years ago. They've been ported to all sorts of devices, including the iPod Classic.

Minecraft: Minecraft is written in Java, and as such, has been decompiled by many people. This allowed people to port the game to all sorts of things, including graphing calculators. Players have also created computers in Minecraft specifically to run Minecraft within itself.

Skyrim: Developer Bethesda Game Studios has ported Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim to several platforms and once joked about porting the game to fridges, Amazon Echo devices and a pager.

Super Mario 64: Modders decompiled the game and posted the results on GitHub. Thanks to these efforts, homebrewed ports of the game have popped up for multiple consoles, including the Nintendo 3DS.

There are other examples, although they tend to stay within the bounds of sanity. Half-Life, Diablo, and Portal all have open-source efforts that have led to homebrewed ports on other game consoles, similar to Super Mario 64. Enterprising Google searchers can find plenty of examples of strange and surprising software ports. For example, did you know that the TI-84 calculator can run a Game Boy emulator? Now you do.

Doom still sits atop the mountain as the game modders prefer when porting a game to something that really shouldn't run games. Where will it show up next?

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