Move Over Toasters: Doom Is Now Playable Inside a PDF

Doom's already graced toasters, refrigerators, and seemingly every other imaginable device, making truly novel ports increasingly rare. However, a high school student has achieved the seemingly impossible: a playable Doom port within a PDF file, runnable directly in your browser.

While lacking sound and detailed text (minor inconveniences, really – who needs those when blasting E1M1 during tax season?), this feat is undeniably impressive.

Github user and high school student ading2210, inspired by the TetrisPDF project, leveraged Javascript within a browser's PDF reader to accomplish this. Browser security restrictions limit the full potential of PDF scripting, but enough functionality remained to port Doom.

Using Javascript's computational power and a six-color ASCII grid for visuals, ading2210 created a surprisingly legible Doom experience, albeit with an 80ms per-frame response time. It's not a PS5 replacement, but the achievement of running Doom within a PDF file is remarkable.

TetrisPDF's creator, Thomas Rinsma, commented on Hacker News, acknowledging ading2210's cleaner implementation of a similar project.

While not ideal for a first-time Doom experience, the continued trend of running Doom on unusual platforms, files, and even living organisms remains endlessly entertaining.