KEY POINTS

  • "Doom" has been ported into a fully interactable GIF   
  • Software engineer Andrew Sillers used livestream-like methods to make "Doom" run as a GIF
  • Actual playability is very bad due to controls and extreme performance issues

It’s been proven time and again that the classic version of Id Software’s “Doom” can run on almost anything. People have ported the game onto smart fridges, calculators and even pregnancy tests. As amazing as these versions are, one man has beaten all of them in terms of ingenuity by porting “Doom” into an interactive .gif that anyone can use.

Software engineer Andrew Sillers announced that he successfully made an interactive GIF of “Doom,” Game Rant reported. Sillers said that this project was made as part of his participation in the virtual !!Con (otherwise known as “BangBangCon”).

The GIF version of “Doom” can be viewed at the AO3 repository, and the way it works is as bizarre as it seems. The game is controlled by pressing the control keys listed on the webpage, but the actual player control for the “game” is shared between everyone who is currently on the page.

Sillers explained how he managed to run “Doom” as a GIF in a static webpage during BangBangCon, and his GitHub page lists the very basic details of how the process works behind the scenes. Basically, the file hosted on AO3 is a “continuously-evolving GIF” that’s technically streaming “Doom” from a separate host machine.

The original Doom is one of the cornerstones of the FPS genre.
The original Doom is one of the cornerstones of the FPS genre. Id Software

The GIF’s controls buttons tell the host machine to save a screenshot of the player character performing the corresponding action. The host machine then updates the GIF on the server, causing it to change images according to whatever controls users have inputted.

Unfortunately, the crowd-controlled element and the single-digit frames-per-second value means that “Doom.gif” is barely playable. The server must constantly load and update the GIF’s frames while also juggling the constant barrage of inputs from every user on the webpage.

However, Sillers’ accomplishment does stand as a testament to the years-old “But can it run Doom?” challenge that the game’s loving community started some time ago. Today’s technology has evolved to the point where even appliances can run a 28-year-old FPS game.

Running “Doom” as a GIF paves the way for the possible creation of a new breed of multiplayer games that can run on a static webpage.

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