Move Over Toasters: Doom Is Now Playable Inside a PDF

Doom's been ported to everything from toasters to refrigerators, seemingly leaving little room for innovation. However, a high school student has achieved the seemingly impossible: running Doom within a PDF file viewable in a browser.

While features like text and sound are absent, the core gameplay of E1M1 is surprisingly intact. This feat, inspired by the TetrisPDF project, was accomplished by Github user ading2210, leveraging Javascript within the browser's PDF reader.

Despite browser security limitations on PDF scripting, ading2210 cleverly utilized Javascript's computational power. A six-color ASCII grid renders the sprites and graphics, resulting in a playable, albeit slow (80ms per frame), version of Doom.

While not a replacement for modern gaming hardware, the achievement of running Doom within a PDF is undeniably impressive, particularly given the readability of the result. Even the creator of TetrisPDF, Thomas Rinsma, praised ading2210's "neater" implementation on Hacker News.

The novelty of Doom's continued conquest of unusual platforms, from files to even gut bacteria, remains endlessly captivating.