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How Doom became the test app for every hacked gadget [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-05-28
Mac Schwerin reports on the use of 1993's Doom to illustrate the computing power of random gadgets with screens, from alarm clocks to pregnancy tests: "The Monster-Slaying Game You Can Play Almost Anywhere."
Doom's most entertaining developments happen in the shadow of the franchise, where fans resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign. These esoteric achievements quickly became a meme. Now they look more like a legacy.
The New York Times even embedded Doom, replete with 1990s shareware ordering information, in its feature. The secret sauce is not just the game's success and relative simplicity. It was designed to be portable and moddable, and it's been open-source for nearly thirty years.
Id had programmed Doom to be easily modifiable by players. Four years after its debut, the company took the radical step of releasing the game's source code to the public for noncommercial use; an international community of fans suddenly had access to the guts of the game, and could retrofit it to all kinds of hardware. "It was not only a gracious move but an ideological one — a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations," David Kushner wrote in his book "Masters of Doom."
Previously:
• Subreddit dedicated to running DOOM on anything and everything
• Margaret Thatcher-themed DOOM mod removed
• Non-Euclidean Doom, where the value of pi is not 3.14159
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