The original Doom, released in 1993, is a damn fine video game. But what if every time you picked up an item you had to pay a small fee to keep playing? That seems like a terrible way to experience this classic shooter. But someone went and made that version of Doom, just in case you were morbidly curious about what the beloved shooter would look like filled with annoying microtransactions.
The old-school, original Doom has been ported to so many different consoles, platforms and devices that at this point it would be really weird if you didn’t own at least three things that could play Doom. And I’m not counting the phone, tablet, or PC you are reading this article on now. However, while Doom has become incredibly flexible and portable to anything—thanks to source ports and mods—it has also become much easier to corrupt this wonderful FPS. And that’s just what someone did at a recent event dedicated to “terrible” technology hacks.
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, on April 13 Twitter user and modder Guy Dupont posted a short video demonstrating his Doom hack. In his horrible, hellish version of Doom, the game pauses every single time you pick up any in-game item, like a new gun or health kit. At that point a QR code appears and you have to scan it with your phone and pay a small fee to continue. Once you’ve paid, Doom unpauses and you can keep playing.
“We need to STOP running Doom on new things and START putting new things into Doom,” said Guy Dupont on Twitter. According to the developer, this was their entry into the annual “Boston Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon.” The event, which was held over the weekend, celebrates dumb, worthless, and horrible tech hacks and software mods.
As for how they pulled this off, here’s how they did it according to the modder:
[Doom] is actually modified! I jammed libcurl into the ‘Chocolate Doom’ source port and wrote a little Python server to generate QR codes and handle the payment info.
When someone asked what that actually meant, the modder provided a simpler explanation:
I put internet access in and then wrote a web server for it to talk to!
Anyway, I hope nobody at Bethesda or Activision or any other large publisher sees this and gets any horrible ideas. I could almost see a company releasing a classic retro game like this for free and then limiting how many things you can pick up or how many times you can die before having to pay a small fee to continue. Maybe they would put it in a large physical box and place it somewhere and it would take coins and oh, I invented an arcade machine. Damnit.
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