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Maybe you’re like me, you’re mindlessly scrolling through social media and between all the NileRed and LegalEagle shorts you see a video about someone running Doom on their smart fridge or something. You LQTM and keep scrolling, but something’s nagging at the back of your brain — why Doom? ow do people even figure this stuff out? And, can I do something like that? I’m here to tell you you can, even if - like me - you don’t have a single hardware hacker bone in your body.
Doom is a popular 1990’s shooter game - a boomer shooter, but back when boomer shooters were just called shooters, but also… did Boomers play shooters? Doom came out in 1993, boomers were like 40 years old by then. Anyways, Doom builds off the fundamentals of predecessors like Wolfenstein, featuring a first-person perspective, an arsenal of weaponry and intricate level design. Doom’s code was famously open-sourced, and famously well written, which has, in part, led to the proliferation of the “It Runs Doom” meme. If you’d like to learn more about how Doom works, I highly recommend the “Game Engine Black Book Doom”, which goes into much more detail than I would be able to.
“It Runs Doom” is a popular memetic construct where by pure skill or psychotic devotion, a programmer gets Doom running on something it probably shouldn’t. Maybe that’s a printer, or an ipod mini, or an oscilloscope, or even… a pregnancy test? Well, yes, but also… no. but… kind of?
