Finally, a reason for the MacBook Touch Bar: running an awful version of Doom

Among hackers, coders, and whoever it actually is that comprises the class of people who self-identify as “makers,” there’s something of a parlor game of rigging weird shit up to run Doom. The 1993 game is the Platonic ideal of a shooter, wired into the primordial goop of late-millennial gamers’ brains. Getting it up and running on increasingly absurd machines and in increasingly absurd places is sort of like a rock band doing a cover of “Gloria.”

And so it is only fitting that an enterprising developer named Adam Bell has finally put the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar to proper use: running a very strange iteration of Id’s classic game. The Touch Bar was intended as an infinitely variable toolbox for design types, a pressure-sensitive panel that could be repurposed for any input.

Or it could be used to run Doom. Here we go:

Full-width and extremely flat, it does not seem like a very good Doom experience, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s on there, and if Doom can be somewhere, it ought to be. Here it is on a graphing calculator:

Here it is in hallucinatory green and blue on the Commodore VIC-20 from 1980:

Here it is being run on an ultrasound monitor:

Here it is running on a hacked Canon printer:

And here is its shred-heavy soundtrack recreated on an old printer, because why not:

If it exists, someone has tried to run Doom on it.

[via Gizmodo]

[Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]