Crafted by ading2210, who describes himself as a “high school student intrigued by programming, web development, and cybersecurity,” the Doom PDF project is quite a novel experiment. It cleverly leverages the inherent Javascript capabilities of PDF files to breathe life into the legendary first-person shooter, Doom, but using text. Although its performance leaves much to be desired and the gameplay is far from smooth, witnessing it in motion is nothing short of astonishing.
On the game’s GitHub page, ading2210 explains, “Most interactive PDF projects I’ve observed use separate text fields toggled on and off to create individual pixels. With Doom’s resolution being 320×200, toggling thousands of text fields per frame isn’t practical. My approach, however, assigns a distinct text field to each row of the screen, filling them with varying ASCII characters. Through this method, I’ve achieved a six-color monochrome output, which renders the game sufficiently readable.”
For those interested in trying it out, Doom PDF functions exclusively on Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Opera. Moreover, it supports custom WADs (these are modded Doom files akin to the recent Gallery Experience). To get started, you’ll need to have the original Doom WAD file on hand.
