PhD student tries to get Doom running on cells

Well, it’s been about a hundredth of a femtosecond, let’s see what people are trying to port Doom onto now. Oh my, would you look at that! It appears as though it’s possible to get id Software’s iconic FPS to “run” on cells.

In a meeting of technology and biology, PhD student Lauren “Ren” Ramlan at MIT (as shared by Reddit user AnNdPh) has figured out a way to use E. coli cells to sort of run Doom. Now, I’m not scientifically minded, so I don’t fully understand how they do it.

In a nutshell: what they’ve been able to do is tweak or modify the cells to – for want of a better term – turn them into monitor pixels. This has then allowed them to display the game in a very rudimentary way.

I hope you have half a millennium to spare

While this means the E. coli cells are technically displaying the game rather than actually running it, it’s still impressive to see Doom being ported in this way.

Ren also notes that the game is only able to run at one frame every 8.33 hours. Using this figure, they estimate it would take around 600 years to complete it in its entirety. Even the likes of Skyrim can’t compete with that kind of longevity.

With the original Doom recently celebrating its 30th anniversary, the legacy of the iconic shooter continues unabated. One can’t help wonder where the FPS genre would be without the 1993 release, but one’s thing for sure, no one’s running Call of Duty on E. coli cells.