Gamers can now play Doom on a PDF file

 A high school student recently went viral after impressively porting Doom (1993) into a PDF file allowing players to experience the iconic game in an awkward yet fun way. Social media users took to several platforms to debate and speculate how something like this is possible. 

A PDF file is widely utilized for its variety since it can be shared, viewed, linked, and printed despite the operating system being used. Additionally, many others rely on it to securely save files, ensuring they cannot be altered by external parties.

Gamers can now play Doom on a PDF file

While it’s mostly used for words and images, GitHub user ‘Ading2210’ has successfully ported Doom (1993) to a PDF document, providing a guide for controls and a greyscale screen to operate the classic game. This left many social media users with one question. How is it possible to run games on PDF documents?

Despite missing important features like sound and color, ‘Ading2210’ managed to successfully port Doom to PDF using a programming language named JavaScript making the game playable on Chromium-based browsers.

According to IGN, the high schooler took inspiration from another developer who ported Tetris to a PDF document under the name “TetrisPDF.”

While limited, playing Doom on a PDF file remains impressive, and who knows, maybe down the line, developers could look into porting more graphically impressive games to see the outcome.