Hey, remember that time Twitch played Pokémon? An amusing endeavor, I’m sure many of you will agree. Well, what if we did the same thing but with another game. Say…Doom? Oh man, that would be pretty amusing to see and not at all complicated to actualize.
Well, would you look at that. Someone’s only gone and done it. YouTuber ThePrimeagen has managed to make the original Doom capable of being played by simultaneous Twitch viewers; 1,000 of them, to be precise. Now, it should be said that this is technically an ASCII version of the classic FPS, but it still stands as an entertaining experiment.
Needless to say, the above video contains a lot of complex information about how they were able to convert and compress the game in such a way as to make it playable via a chat log. I’m not even going to attempt to explain it, as the knowledge I have of programming and software engineering is on par with my expertise on hyperlocal economics in the region of – oh, I don’t know – the town of Shitterton in England (look it up).
It’s real
If you want to just see the part where 1,000 people play the opening section of Doom, you will need to pretty much skip to the last minute of the video. If you are genuinely fascinated by how it’s all achieved, I’ll see you in 15 minutes.
Right at the end, we get to see the final result of ThePrimeagen’s work, which involves tasking people in Twitch chat to control Doom. You all know how this work, which means you probably also know how this turns out.
There are a large number of hiccups along the way, including Doom Guy continually falling down a staircase before he’s able to get up it. However, the effort is worth the wait, as the viewers do manage to complete the first level of Doom, tricky though it clearly was. Isn’t technology pretty cool?
