A developer has made Doom run in Windows Notepad, the bare-bones text editor that was absolutely not designed to run video games. Humankind’s hubris continues to twist the natural order, accumulating a debt that must one day come due.
Sam Chiet shared his achievement on Twitter, posting a video of Doom running on Notepad at 60 frames per second in fuzzy black and white ASCII art. According to Chiet, the footage has not been sped up, and Notepad’s code has not been modified or tampered with.
“this is fully playable interactive live, zero fakery. this is exactly what it looks like,” he wrote.
“finally, i created the ideal way to play. you’re welcome.”
Chiet is no stranger to utilising his coding powers for silly software shenanigans. The self-proclaimed “idea goblin/experiment-creator” previously released Desktop Goose — an avian desktop menace whose sole purpose is to steal your cursor, wreck your life, and look adorable while doing it.
Fortunately for anyone who dreams of playing an early ’90s first-person shooter entirely in ASCII art themselves, Chiet is currently working on making Notepad Doom suitable to be unleashed upon the wider public.
“it’ll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it’ll almost certainly happen over the next couple days,” Chiet tweeted.
Released in 1993, Doom is a first-person shooter originally developed by id Software for the now ancient operating system MS-DOS. This classic game doesn’t take much to run by today’s standards, with computers, games, and graphics having significantly evolved since its release almost 30 years ago.
Getting Doom to run on unconventional platforms has thus become an ongoing meme, with tech-savvy chaos gremlins getting it to work on everything from a MacBook Pro Touch Bar, to a NordicTrack treadmill, to a John Deere tractor, to a digital pregnancy test. They’ve even Inception-ed Doom to run on a virtual computer in Minecraft.
Now Windows Notepad can be added to the long, weird list of things that run Doom. Though whether anyone’s eyes can parse the ASCII art long enough to finish the game is another matter.
