You can now play Doom on a candy bar

The original Doom from 1993 can now be played almost anywhere. Just in time for Halloween, an American hardware manufacturer has come up with something very special: Doom on a chocolate bar. In this article you will find out what it is all about and on which other strange “platforms” the legendary first-person shooter still runs.

The fact that the original MS-DOS version of Doom from 1993 runs everywhere has now become a running gag. It’s not for nothing that there is a dedicated meme subreddit called “Will it run DOOM?” where the most absurd and funniest ways to play the legendary shooter are shared.

For this year’s Halloween, a US hardware manufacturer is probably putting the provisional crown on this highest tradition of gaming and hardware hacking. Namely, Adafruit Industries managed to get Doom to run on a candy bar-like device.

The “Candy of Doom” by Adafruit Industries

The company recently posted a video on its Twitter account showing the bar in question – appropriately wrapped in Milky Way packaging.

Aside from the already entertaining premise, it’s also funny that Milky Way candy bars are sold as “Mars” outside of the US. We also know this bar in Germany.

This means you can now “gamble on Mars” in two ways. After all, the action of the first person shooter also takes place on said planet.

If you want to learn about the world’s first gaming console, you can in this article:

Can you really gamble Doom on the candy bar?

The manufacturer has not yet given any information as to whether the retro game on the bar is actually playable or just an automatic video. However, since Adafruit are known for their unique and innovative electronic devices and components, it is easy to imagine that the “Candy of Doom” can actually be gambled on.

For example, earlier this year, a video on Adafruit Industries’ YouTube channel showed how the company also made Doom playable on one of their extremely tiny development boards called the QT Py ESP32. Accordingly, it is quite obvious that one of these boards or at least a similar module could possibly be in the bar.

The device is obviously not used with caramel and milk chocolate.

More curious platforms to play Doom on

However, Adafruit Industries were far from the first to get Doom running on a slightly off-the-beaten-track platform. On the contrary: making Doom playable on what feels like any electrical device that has a display is one of the greatest traditions when it comes to hacking games or hardware. Countless creative minds have already presented their own playable versions of the game on some of the most curious platforms.

But since it would be almost impossible to list all these ports here, we will therefore show you a few particularly absurd examples:

Doom on a printer

A few years ago, a security leak in the Canon Proxima printer range became known. To prove how easy it was to access the Proxima printers’ software, a security researcher loaded Doom onto one of these devices via a firmware update.

The result was a horrible looking, but at least fully playable, version of the classic. Unfortunately, due to the technical limitations of the printer, it had no sound.

Doom on an ATM

As a rule, the goal of people who hack an ATM is certainly not to get this Doom working, but to get money quickly.

However, a few Australians took advantage of the Windows XP operating system on one of these devices to install a playable variant of the game anyway. Meanwhile, the group also managed to reconfigure the ATM’s side buttons to act as buttons to select the various weapons.

The idea that you have to complete a Doom level before you can withdraw money is not only hilarious but should be the next logical step in the evolution of civilization.

Doom on a Canon camera

Any electronic device with a display has the potential to play Doom on it. That’s probably what YouTuber “raccoon” thought too, who used code from the “Will it run DOOM?” subreddit to run the game on a Canon EOS RP camera earlier this year.

However, Raccoon is by no means the first to port a playable version of the classic to a camera. For example, the YouTuber “LGR” made it possible three years ago to play Doom on a digital camera from 1998.

Doom on a pregnancy test

Now it’s getting really wild. Twitter user foone posted a video two years ago showing an admittedly hard-to-see copy of Doom running on the monochrome display of a pregnancy test. At first it was just a small video of the game, but according to foone the classic is now completely playable on the unusual “console”.

That this is possible at all is due to the fact that 8-bit microcontrollers are usually installed in pregnancy tests, as was the case with very early PCs. According to foone is: “The thing […] probably faster in number crunching and basic input/output than the processor in the original IBM PC.”

Doom in Doom

You read that right! The YouTuber “kgsws” actually managed to program a playable version of Doom within Doom. Not only does it look like a scene from the well-known film Inception, the whole process behind it was also extremely complex.

If you want to see for yourself how kgsws managed to do this, you should take a look at this short documentation:

Doom on Potatoes (!?)

To top it off, this article ends as it began: with something to eat.

YouTuber “Equalo” managed to make a playable version of Doom possible on a graphing calculator using moldy potatoes that generated electricity.

The fact that potatoes with a little zinc and copper can be used to generate electricity is nothing new. Using that chemical battery to power a calculator you can play Doom with is completely ingenious though.

If you want to know how many potatoes were needed for this and why they started to mold, you should watch the following video:

Tired of ridiculous video game anecdotes? If you want to know about the weirdest, and at times the ugliest, PlayStation controllers that have been released, here’s an article for you:

The ugliest and weirdest PlayStation controllers