Doom was thought to have been ported to every machine imaginable. We were wrong. A developer has indeed the idea for the less absurd to be able to play FPS since… a key of his keyboard. A Raspberry Pi and a few magic tricks later, the cult game runs perfectly.
There’s no denying that video game history has a certain sense of irony. Take Doom for example. At the time of its release, the game was a real technological revolution. Not only is it the first first-person video game, it’s also the first 3D PC game to be able to run smoothly. In short, Doom paved the way for modern video games and by achieving the feat of being, precisely, playable.
(Almost) 30 years later, the situation has changed a lot. Our devices, whether dedicated to gaming or not, have become far more powerful than the best PC of the 1990s. One of the best indicators for this evolution is surely the running gag of porting Doom on just about everything and anything. A light bulb, Windows Notepad, the list is particularly long and each new project is crazier than the last.
They spin Doom on a keyboard key, we’re no longer close to that
We therefore thought we had seen the end of it, the joke being somewhat hackneyed. But that was without counting on the TheKeebProject collective, which found a new way to play FPS: on a keyboard key. You read correctly. In theory, thanks to the realization of the developers, it is possible to play Doom on your keyboard… while playing Doom on your PC.
Related — Doom Creator John Romero is Working on a New Unreal Engine 5 FPS
More specifically, Doom turns on the keycap, the plastic component that hits the PCB of your keyboard to instruct it to write the desired character. TheKeebProject had the good idea to introduce a Raspberry Pi and a tiny screen in the keycap and a few hours of work later, the job is done. The video of the exploit can be found above. We let you admire the marvel, while we wait for the next port, even crazier than this one.