Move Over Toasters: Doom Is Now Playable Inside a PDF

Doom has been ported to devices like toasters, a fridge, and pretty much everything else you can think of, so the frontier for truly remarkable things that can run Doom is wearing thin. But one high-schooler has managed to port Doom into an actual PDF file that you can run inside your browser.

Sure, it’s missing minor elements like “text” and “sound” — but who really needs that when you can play E1M1 while pretending to do those taxes you’ve been ignoring?

Github user and “high school student” ading2210 was inspired by a recent port of Tetris, named TetrisPDF, to the humble PDF format, and resolved to make one of the world’s most celebrated shooters playable in a Chromium-based browser near you.

ading2210 harnessed the way Javascript is used inside a browser’s PDF reader to port Doom to a .PDF file. While the official specifications for a PDF allow for more sophisticated scripting, security concerns in browsers cut things down a bit. But it was enough to still port Doom over to the format.

The Javascript capabilities within the PDF specifications allowed ading2210 to “do whatever computation we want,” and the results are glorious. Using a six-color ASCII grid to represent sprites and graphics, the high-schooler managed to deliver a legible port of Doom, so long as you’re happy with a lengthy response time of 80ms per frame drawn on screen.

You might not want to throw out your PS5 just yet, but seeing Doom ported to the inside of a .PDF file is pretty remarkable, especially considering just how legible the overall result is.

TetrisPDF creator Thomas Rinsma posted on Hacker News that he had also made his own version of PDF Doom, but added that ading2210’s version was “neater in many ways.”

While you might not want this version of Doom to be the way you first experience the game, the novelty of seeing Doom run on all kinds of ridiculous devices, files (or even living gut bacteria) is endlessly entertaining.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.