PhD Student Manages To Run Doom On E. Coli Cells

It is Doom’s world and we are just living in it. This 1993 FPS by id Software will run on anything and everything. Last time we checked someone was running Doom on a pregnancy test, yes, and not forgetting a literal graphic calculator, a printer, an ATM, and what in the world not, and if all of this doesn’t make your jaw drop, this PhD student running Doom on E. Coli cells definitely will.

Collaborating biology with technology, PhD student Lauren Ramlan has tried to run Doom on cells. To put a whole lot of science behind this impressive achievement, in a nutshell, what Lauren did was to enable cells to function as pixels. What we see is a 1-bit black-and-white display where a pixel is either on or off, represented by 1 and 0 respectively.

Lauren’s experiment technically ‘showcases’ Doom rather than ‘running’ it but nevertheless, it is an impressive achievement. Furthermore, the doctoral student found out that it takes approximately 70 minutes to achieve the peak image display of one Doom frame on cells and 8.3 hours to load the next frame. Based on these numbers, it will take around 600 years to complete the game on cells.

Moving forward, Lauren’s entry in the “Doom Runs On Everything” (DROE) trend just proves that we are not over the Doom craze anytime soon. Only in 2023, did we see the shooter on 4 DOS PCs, a Unity 3D Inspector, and many more. And, if these gadgets don’t sound unusual enough, next up is Doom running on an Ultrasound scanner.

id Software’s first-person shooter, Doom has recently celebrated its 30th anniversary on December 10. The first entry in the series was initially released in 1993 for MS-DOS and has since been ported to platforms from all generations. The series’ latest entry, Doom Eternal, was released initially in March 2020 for PS4, PC, and Xbox One followed by Nintendo Switch in December and PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in June 2021.