GoKawiilThe first-person demon-shooting Doom has some shocking longevity. The video game has been part of tech culture since it launched in 1993, with its signature view of a gun centered of the screen firing at nightmarish pixelated fiends becoming an iconic image in gaming. Even if you've never played, you've seen it. That isn't even necessarily because of nostalgia, although that's a factor. To some extent, it's because Doom can seemingly be played on anything with electricity running through it.
This isn't new. Doom has, essentially, always been a port. It was developed by id Software on a NeXTcube workstation, but its first release was to IBM PCs running MS-DOS. Less than two years after its initial launch, it was ported to OS/2, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux and Microsoft Windows.
It was also ported to a load of consoles, including the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This trend continued for literally decades, and you can buy Doom on your Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 today, along with PC and, at least for a while, the Nintendo Switch.
That alone is impressive. There have been dozens of official ports over the years, and that has no doubt helped the game's longevity. Younger gamers can continue to experience the godfather of the first-person shooter genre without having to unearth hardware and operating systems from the Clinton administration.
It's with the unofficial ports that things start to get weird. Doom has become a meme thanks to the challenge of getting it to run on anything with pixels -- or something close enough. At its I/O developer conference this year, Google engineers showed off an operating system they vibe-coded from scratch using Gemini AI -- by running Doom on it.
As it turns out, that's part of a long tradition.
The original SNES version of Doom had a striking red cartridge, which housed the SuperFX chip necessary to run the game on an SNES. id Software
How the Doom meme started
We're going to use some really fun words in this article that don't seem like they should be here, such as "potato" and "pregnancy test." However, the game's descent into porting madness began innocently enough. The first port that raised eyebrows was to the Super Nintendo, which launched in the US in 1991. At the time, the Super Nintendo lacked the hardware to properly run the game, and folks believed that running Doom on the Super Nintendo was impossible. The SNES had a 16-bit chip that was far too weak to run it, so the only hope was a game cartridge containing a SuperFX chip, a coprocessor that assisted the SNES in processing 3D graphics.
Despite looking nearly impossible on paper, an enterprising developer for Sculptured Software named Randy Linden undertook the challenge anyway. The game required a significant amount of work. In an interview with Gaming Reinvented, Linden outlined his experience porting the game.
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