30 Years After Doom’s Release, These Are the 30 Best-Worst Ways to Play the Game That Started It All

If anybody remembers the old “Can it run Crysis?” meme, the joke has long since fallen flat as more games have long exceeded the specs requirement on that 16-year-old game. On the flip side, “Can it run Doom?” has a separate connotation. It belies the ingenuity of tinkerers and DIYers trying to find the most unique system to support a game that first hit store shelves on Dec. 10, 1993.

But there’s more than memes propelling folks to find new places to play Doom. ID Software published the source code to the game many moons ago, making it easy to access and recompile. Developers have routinely said the engine powering Doom is well put together and organized, making porting the title that much easier. It is made in the C coding language, and most platforms have access to a C compiler, but more importantly, people have kept the game up to date through ports such as Chocolate Doom.

And, of course, let’s not forget a whole heap of nostalgia for the original game.

We’ve dug deep to find our top 30 wild ways folks can run Doom, from the best Inception-style game-within-game to the strangest contraptions capable of playing a 30-year-old title. Who knew combining a hoard of rotting potatoes with a graphing calculator would be an extreme way to play Doom? Try getting the game running on the fingernail-sized screen of a pregnancy test.

We should also thank multiple blogs and forums that inspired our search, including the ItRunsDoom Tumblr and Reddit, which has long cataloged these entries into Doom history. There’s also Twitter user @Lord_Arse, who cataloged a whole curated selection of excellent Doom ports to some very interesting mediums.

If anybody remembers the old “Can it run Crysis?” meme, the joke has long since fallen flat as more games have long exceeded the specs requirement on that 16-year-old game. On the flip side, “Can it run Doom?” has a separate connotation. It belies the ingenuity of tinkerers and DIYers trying to find the most unique system to support a game that first hit store shelves on Dec. 10, 1993.

But there’s more than memes propelling folks to find new places to play Doom. ID Software published the source code to the game many moons ago, making it easy to access and recompile. Developers have routinely said the engine powering Doom is well put together and organized, making porting the title that much easier. It is made in the C coding language, and most platforms have access to a C compiler, but more importantly, people have kept the game up to date through ports such as Chocolate Doom.

And, of course, let’s not forget a whole heap of nostalgia for the original game.

We’ve dug deep to find our top 30 wild ways folks can run Doom, from the best Inception-style game-within-game to the strangest contraptions capable of playing a 30-year-old title. Who knew combining a hoard of rotting potatoes with a graphing calculator would be an extreme way to play Doom? Try getting the game running on the fingernail-sized screen of a pregnancy test.

We should also thank multiple blogs and forums that inspired our search, including the ItRunsDoom Tumblr and Reddit, which has long cataloged these entries into Doom history. There’s also Twitter user @Lord_Arse, who cataloged a whole curated selection of excellent Doom ports to some very interesting mediums.