Doom running on Notepad looks like a match made in hell

Another day, another person getting Doom running on something it was never intended to – this time, Notepad!

If I had a nickel for every weird place you’re able to play Doom, I’d probably have quite a few nickels, because people just seem incredibly determined to get it to run on anything they can get their hands on. Today, this particular nickel of mine comes from developer Samperson, who got Doom running on the note taking software Notepad (slight flashing warning in the example video seen below).

While it’s definitely one of the more unreadable versions of Doom, you have to admit when watching the video, this is in fact Doom. The game itself is obviously made up of a bunch of various characters lined up to resemble the visuals of Doom. It even sounds like Samperson got the audio and soundtrack working and synced up, which could not be anything but witchcraft.

Samperson made a few notes of the game saying that the footage isn’t sped up, and that the code of notepad.exe hasn’t been modified one bit. He also made it clear that “this is fully playable interactive live, zero fakery. This is exactly what it looks like,” and that “this is your fault,” so I’m sorry for bringing this upon the world, I guess.

In a later tweet Samperson did say that “it’ll take some work to polish NotepadDOOM into something releasable, but it’ll almost certainly happen over the next couple days,” so if you’re desperately looking to play Doom in a way that will cause some eye strain, keep your eyes peeled.

This latest iteration of Doom even captured the attention of legendary Doom designer John Romero who simply called it “incredible.”

While you can’t play this particular Doom, Doomscroll is an alternative way to experience the game, a Twitter bot that is posting frames of the game bit by bit. Or alternatively, you could play it on a Lego brick.