You Can Now Run Classic 1993 Video Game Doom on Gut Bacteria, But There's a Big Catch
Fans of the seminal 1993 first-person shooter Doom have no shortage of ways to play the iconic video game.
You can play it on pretty much any computer made after 1997. You can play it on the Sony PlayStation. You can play it on the Xbox One. You can play it on the Game Boy Advance. You can play it on your phone. You can play it… on a piano? And an ultrasound scanner?
Wait. What?
Yes, if you’re at all tuned with video game culture or gaming memes, you’ve undoubtedly heard the long-running joke: “Can it run Doom?”
In fact, that memetic question has spawned its own website that keeps careful track of the oddities that one can play Doom on.
Those oddities include everyday items like a graphing calculator, a toaster, a Porsche’s dashboard screen, an ATM, a conferencing phone, the back of a Kodak camera, a thermostat and a digital pregnancy test.
Yes, you can really play Doom on a stick to determine pregnancy.
And yet, that pregnancy test may not be the oddest place to play Doom anymore.
No, the title of weirdest place to play Doom is firmly in the grasp of an MIT student who got Doom running on a display made of E. coli bacteria.
Rock Paper Shotgun reports: “The enterprising setup comes from MIT biotechnology PhD student researcher Lauren ‘Ren’ Ramlan, who created a 32×48 1-bit display made up of E. coli cells, with each cell effectively serving as an individual pixel by lighting them up as required using a fluorescent protein.”
Now, before any entrepreneurial parents tell their children that they don’t need that fancy new computer monitor when they can just collect E. coli bacteria by eating bad beef or something, there is one major caveat to Ramlan’s astounding feat.
Namely, the project is functionally not playable.
(To be fair, the memetic questions have always been “Can it run Doom?” and not “Can it play Doom?”)
As Ramlan told Rock Papers Shotgun, the game effectively runs at a single frame per eight hours and 20 minutes. For those not in the know, the big gaming debate about framerate centers around 30 frames per second and 60 frames per second.
The bacterial display of Doom runs at a molasses-slow one frame per eight hours.
Per Ramlan, using this cell display and waiting for frames to refresh would mean that beating the game — a feat that normally takes about four to five hours for non-speedrunners — would take a whopping 599 years to complete.
That’s obviously not feasible, but it still highlights how dedicated fans of the seminal shooter are.
And can you blame them?
Doom, for all the memes it has spawned, is considered by many to be the forefather of modern first-person shooters.
WARNING: The following clip contains images of pixelated gore that some viewers may find disturbing
The frenetic, violent and fast-paced shooter laid the groundwork for the twitchy gameplay of Call of Duty, which is arguably the biggest first-person shooter in existence today.
In fact, Doom flexed its muscles a bit in 2016, when the franchise went through a modernized reboot and won over swathes of new fans in the process.
Between the popularity of the 2016 Doom, its critically acclaimed sequel, Doom: Eternal and the fact that people are still trying to find newer and stranger ways to play the original version, it’s clear that Doom — in all of its forms — isn’t going away anytime soon.
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