The Latest Version of Doom Is a CAPTCHA
Doom may be over 30 years old, but people haven’t gotten tired of it yet. On the contrary: fans have ported the horror game to just about every platform imaginable, from graphing calculators and treadmills to pregnancy tests . If it has a screen, it can probably run Doom .
Given this, it’s perhaps not surprising that the latest version of Doom is designed to run in your internet browser. In fact, there are probably dozens of ways to access the original Doom online. However, what makes this version unique is that you don’t just play in a browser window, but in a CAPTCHA window.
CAPTCHAs are, of course, tiny challenges you encounter when trying to access anything on the internet that are designed to prove that you are actually a human and not an automated bot. Some of the earliest CAPTCHAs required you to enter a garbled sequence of characters—something that a robot (or perhaps these days a generative AI bot) would have a hard time getting around on its own. Since then, these problem types have expanded to cover a wide range of puzzles and challenges. This now includes a playable version of Doom .
Doom is surprisingly interesting in terms of CAPTCHAs
As reported by TechCrunch , the 1993-style CAPTCHA was created by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. The company happens to have an artificial intelligence website builder, which Rauch used to create this port. You can try it for yourself here .
Although the game came out over three decades ago and this version only offers a snippet of the full experience, this version of Doom with CAPTCHA is not easy . The goal is to simply kill three enemies before the enemies kill you. You can use the arrow keys to move forward, backward, left and right, and the spacebar to shoot. That’s it. However, as soon as you move forward, enemies will start shooting at you and death is just around the corner.
One of the reasons for the difficulty is the sheer amount of firepower coming at you from all sides. The CAPTCHA takes place in a small arena, in a cage in the center of which there is a horde of monsters shooting fire at you. There are four corridors leading out of the arena, and in each of them there are even more enemies shooting at you.
How to beat Doom: CAPTCHA Edition
From my short experience of playing this captcha, I can give three tips: the first is to hold down the spacebar to make as many shots as possible. DOOM doesn’t care about accuracy, so your goal is to simply run into enemies while shooting to hit them. The second is to ignore the enemies in the central cage: there are too many of them, and you will quickly be engulfed in fire. It’s better to run past and try to shoot the enemies in one of the corridors. Since the caged monsters will shoot at you, they may hit and kill some enemies in the hallways, which won’t affect your kill requirements but will give you a split second of breathing room to target another enemy.
Finally, I suggest making at least one move and running around the cage as many times as you can. You’ll survive longer than expected and get to watch the caged monsters mow down a ton of enemies in the hallway. Play your cards right and you can use this tactic to get three kills of your own and win the CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, since there is no site to visit, you won’t actually win anything other than the game contained within. At least you proved that you are human.
As TechCrunch points out, this isn’t even the first time Doom has been ported to CAPTCHA. Mikel Camps Orteza made a CAPTCHA game back in 2021 , but that offering was much more limited. Instead of running around a small map, this CAPTCHA simply forced you to pick off stationary enemies one by one until you reached a quota of four kills. If you prefer your Doom: CAPTCHA to be more challenging and raise your stakes, stick with Rauch’s.