By the end of next year, the original Doom game will officially be three decades old. However, despite its age, it will be a long time before its legacy will be forgotten. The fact that it's one of the most genre-defining FPS games in history means that it probably won't fade into obscurity for a long time, if at all. To this day it's still influencing other titles, and over the years, it's been the subject of experimentation as people try to get it to run on all kinds of wacky devices, including this one.
In a video uploaded to YouTube a few days ago, the channel Adafruit Industries has shown that it's possible to play 1993's Doom on a computer chip board, in this case a System-in-Package module, that's about the size of, if not smaller than, a credit card. The short footage shows that the game runs perfectly through a 1.3-inch TFT display running at a resolution of 240x240. The controls comprise a series of basic switches directly on the board, and they've even managed to implement a headphone jack, so anyone playing can still get sound.
There have been many unusual devices that Doom has been ported to, but this version, nicknamed "PINKY" is probably one of the smallest machines that runs the game. An additional blog post from the creator explains that this iteration of the game being run on the ESP32 Pico device is called "PrBoom" which is described as a "minimal version" of Doom. User DESK OF LADYADA, who initiated the port, says that the screen is probably the smallest that can be used in this instance that still has "pixel perfect" emulation.
It's an impressive port in general, showing that id Software's classic release still holds a special place in the gaming community, often used as a way to test emulations or just to see what weird devices can be turned into gaming machines. While its status as an important landmark in gaming is solidified, Doom has sort of become a meme over the years, and it's possibly that which has helped it stay culturally relevant.
Developer id Software is one of the most influential studios around, particularly in the early days of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake when the FPS genre was still in its infancy. Of course, the team has moved on since those days and advanced in numerous ways. The reboot of Doom in 2016, and the follow-up in 2020, show that it's a franchise which is still making waves to this day, but fans will always be drawn to the classics.
Source: Adafruit
