You won’t believe it, but a high school student who goes by the username ading2210 has taken a stab at something pretty ambitious: recreating the classic first-person shooter, Doom, within a PDF file. This intriguing project taps into the file format’s built-in Javascript capabilities to bring the game to life in text form. It’s not exactly smooth or entirely playable, but watching it function is genuinely impressive.
Ading2210 offers insight into the creative process on the game’s GitHub page. Unlike other interactive PDFs that rely on switching individual text fields on and off to represent pixels, ading2210 had to think outside the box because Doom’s resolution of 320×200 would entail toggling thousands of fields per frame, a task that’s simply impractical. The solution? Use a separate text field for each row on the screen and populate them with various ASCII characters. This technique resulted in a monochrome output with six colors—just enough to make the game recognizable and functional.
It’s important to note that Doom PDF operates only in Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Opera, and it even allows for custom WADs, which are modified Doom files such as the intriguing Gallery Experience. However, to make these mods work, you’ll need the original Doom WAD.
