Doom Now Playable in PDF: Toasters Outdone

Doom has been ingeniously ported to a variety of unconventional devices, from toasters to fridges, and seemingly everything in between. Yet, the quest for new frontiers continues, and a high school student has now taken it a step further by porting Doom into a PDF file that you can run directly in your browser.

Sure, this version of Doom might be missing elements like text and sound, but who needs those when you can play E1M1 and simultaneously dodge those taxes you've been putting off?

The GitHub user and high school student, ading2210, drew inspiration from the TetrisPDF project to bring one of the world's most iconic shooters to the humble PDF format, playable in any Chromium-based browser.

The JavaScript functionalities in the PDF allowed ading2210 to perform any necessary computations, resulting in a remarkable adaptation of Doom. Using a six-color ASCII grid to represent sprites and graphics, the high schooler managed to create a recognizable version of Doom, albeit with a frame response time of 80ms.

While you might not want to trade in your PS5 just yet, the feat of running Doom inside a .PDF file is truly impressive, especially given the legibility of the final product.

Thomas Rinsma, the creator of TetrisPDF, shared on Hacker News that he had also developed his own version of PDF Doom but praised ading2210's rendition as "neater in many ways."

Though this version of Doom may not be the ideal introduction to the game, the sheer novelty of seeing Doom run on everything from unusual devices to files, or even living gut bacteria, remains endlessly captivating.