The weirdest devices that can play Doom, including a LEGO brick and an ATM

Doom is one of the most influential video games of all time, but its creators surely had no idea how their work would ultimately be immortalized. id Software’s 1993 first-person shooter helped define the genre when it was first released on PC. Now its reach has gone far beyond the PC, launching on everything from handhelds to smartphones to modern consoles to…a LEGO brick?
“Will Doom work?” is a long-running internet challenge where modders and programmers attempt to make the game work on any device imaginable. When you ask the question “Will Doom work?” the answer is – most often – yes. Below is a list of some of the wackiest devices that can run Doom… with visual and gameplay quality varying widely depending on the gadget.
Everything is awesome, including Doom running on a LEGO brick
In what may be the smallest possible way to play Doom, Twitter user James Brown runs the game on a LEGO brick. In the video below, you can see very blurry gameplay on a tilted tiny blue LEGO piece. Brown says the resolution on the bricked monitor is 72 x 40 pixels, with only 1 bit per pixel. While trying to play and complete this version of Doom would be more painful than stepping on a LEGO brick, it’s still an amazing novelty to watch.
I wired the brick up as a very small external monitor, so you can, for example, play Doom on it. pic.twitter.com/uWK2Uw7Egr
—James Brown (@ancient_james) June 19, 2022
Make the demons pay with Doom at an ATM
In 2014, some very crafty Doom fans figured out how to make Doom work on an ATM. In a YouTube video, the creators explain how Doom works on the slot, including using the side buttons and pinpad. Some commenters have suggested how the idea could be taken even further, including printing out a receipt with your score after each run, or forcing you to beat a level before accessing your bank account.
A TI-84 Plus calculator powered by potatoes
Glancing at a Texas Instruments calculator probably gives many of you flashbacks to high school pre-calculus…but what if that calculator ran Doom instead? That’s what YouTube user Equalo did in 2020. To make the project even crazier, the calculator was powered by hundreds of potatoes.
Play Doom on your phone… Your rotary phone, that is
Much like the fashion for beating games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls with crazy controllers, one person installed an old rotary phone to use as a Doom controller. Dialing different numbers controls player movement – albeit at a snail’s pace – while dialing a 1 fires a shot at enemies.
Run like hell in Doom on a NordicTrack treadmill
On the itrunsdoom subreddit, an user posted a video of Doom running on a NordicTrack treadmill screen. Some commenters suggested having to run to get Doomguy moving, but it wasn’t implemented at the time. Another one reddit poster talked about getting their college recreation center’s treadmill to run Doom, but they were kicked out of the gym mid-test for abusing the equipment.
iPod Nano can play Solitaire, Brick and, you guessed it, Doom
The first generations of iPod Nanos played extremely simple games like Brick and Solitaire, but naturally someone made Doom work on the small screen as well.
Create memories with Doom on a digital camera
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably sensed a running theme: if it has a screen, it can and will play Doom. Someone even ran the game on a digital camera. It’s extremely jerky and feels incredibly uncomfortable to control with the camera’s menu buttons, but it’s still Doom.
Take a break from Doomscrolling with Doom on Twitter
It’s a very different way to play the classic FPS, as the Twitter version of Doom requires users to enter various commands into Twitter replies to control the game. Tweet2Doom bot will then respond to those responses with a 10 second clip of what happens next. There are even speedruns of specific levels of this version of the game.
⠀
ROOT node for Doom Shareware 1.9
Read the instructions in the images below.
⠀ pic.twitter.com/YszpiKnXEE— Tweet2Doom (@tweet2doom) October 2, 2021
Programmer designs Doom running on pregnancy test
A named programmer Foone Turing decided to make Doom playable during a pregnancy test, using a small keyboard. The end result is an extremely blurry version of the game playing on a 128 x 32 pixel monochrome screen. Foone worked on several projects using pregnancy tests, including a very limited keyboard where you could only type one letter while peeing on the test.
Yesterday I got a lot of retweets and posts on reddit and such for playing Doom on a pregnancy test.
But as I explained then, it wasn’t actually PLAYING on a pregnancy test, it was just a video being played, not an interactive game.Well, now it is. It’s the Doom pregnancy test! pic.twitter.com/Nrjyq07EVv
—Foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020
Doomception: Play Doom on a PC running in Minecraft
Reddit user DeltaTwoForce has created an awesome Minecraft mod where you can build computers that work like virtual machines. In a video of the mod, you can see the player testing out programs like Paint and, of course, Doom on computers. So this basically creates a game within a game. This should not be confused with the Minecraft mod which creates a whole new Doom adventure map in Minecraft gameplay.
Even Rats Play Doom Now
A researcher named Viktor Toth conducted an experiment to see if he could train a rat to run down a straight hallway in Doom using a VR platform. The rat runs above a sphere that controls the character’s movement, and Toth has even experimented with training the rat to shoot enemies. The purpose of the experiment was to see if VR software is a reliable way to conduct experiments in a more cost-effective way.
This is just a sampling of all the wild devices that can play Doom. There will no doubt be even crazier gadgets capable of playing Doom in the years to come, though it will admittedly be hard to beat a LEGO brick and a pregnancy test. Alternatively, you can still play Doom Eternal on the Steam Deck, where it works extremely well on Valve’s device.
Doom is available for purchase on… well… pretty much everything. Refresh your memory on why this is one of the best first person shooters of all time here.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPplant.