Move Over Toasters: Doom Is Now Playable Inside a PDF

Doom's already conquered toasters, refrigerators, and seemingly every other imaginable device. The bar for impressive Doom ports is incredibly high, yet a high school student has achieved the seemingly impossible: running Doom within a PDF file, playable directly in your browser.

Naturally, some features are absent – like text and sound. But who needs those when you can conquer E1M1 while procrastinating on your taxes?

Github user and high school student, ading2210, inspired by the TetrisPDF project, undertook the challenge. Leveraging Javascript within a browser's PDF reader, ading2210 cleverly bypassed browser security limitations to achieve this feat.

The PDF's Javascript capabilities allowed for complex computations. Using a six-color ASCII grid for sprites and graphics, ading2210 created a surprisingly playable, albeit slow (80ms per frame), version of Doom.

While it won't replace your PS5, the achievement of running Doom within a PDF is remarkable, particularly given its legibility. TetrisPDF creator Thomas Rinsma even praised ading2210's version on Hacker News as "neater in many ways."

This might not be the ideal way to experience Doom for the first time, but the ongoing trend of running Doom on absurd platforms, files, and even living organisms remains endlessly entertaining.