Doom changed the video game industry by revolutionizing the first-person shooter genre. However, it has managed to stay relevant over the decades thanks to fans who have made it run on almost any device you can think of. From printers to pregnancy tests, no platform has been left out when it comes to ripping and tearing demons.
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2025 Is The Year I Finish Doom
I’ve played, but never finished, most Doom games. I trust The Dark Ages to put that right.
However, very few of these Doom “ports” actually have any use – you’re not going to know if you’re pregnant by completing a level on the pregnancy test. It seems that one of the latest places that can run Doom actually has some use. Instead of checking boxes that have a bus or a traffic light in it, you can complete a level of Doom to prove you’re not a robot.
Kill Three Demons To Prove You’re Human
Created by Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, via their company’s AI site builder, this new twist on the Captcha verification process requires you to kill three monsters to prove that you’re human (thanks, TechCrunch). I suppose I’m a robot, because it’s really hard to kill three monsters – in fact, I’ve barely managed to kill even one in about five to six tries. Try it out for yourself here.
It seems, I’m not the only one that found it difficult, as one comment pointed out that “This is the secret level (E1M9) that you’d normally encounter after E1M3. By this point in the regular progression you’d have found a shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and probably some armor. Starting this level with just a pistol (and it looks like maybe U-V or Nightmare difficulty) is just begging for a buttwhipping.”
Regardless of the difficulty, this Doom Captcha is way more fun than identifying bicycles in a box or deciphering an alphanumeric code to prove that you’re a human being. Maybe they could turn the difficulty down a bit, though, so we don’t find ourselves questioning our own sentience.
I don’t think we’ll see this system actually get implemented on any websites anytime soon, and bots can be trained to play Doom, so it seems like it may not be able to protect against AI. However, there’s a chance that it may stop demons from taking over.
One of the most iconic and impactful games ever made, Doom puts you in the role of a marine sent to a research facility on Mars. When a portal to Hell unleashes a horde of demons, it’s up to you to blast them into oblivion.