Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow

Since the dawn of time (give or take a few years), mankind has challenged itself to get id Software’s 1993 classic Doom running on the most outlandish and impractical hardware and software possible: refrigerators, calculators, pregnancy tests, etc. One time, somebody got Doom to run inside of Doom. Today, YouTuber Samperson (Sam Chiet) demonstrated that he has Doom running in Notepad at 60 frames per second. Yes, this is Notepad the basic text editor program that comes preinstalled in every Windows computer, but it’s using its text to recreate the visuals of Doom.

Samperson insists the footage in the clip below has not been sped up, the code for Notepad.exe has not been modified at all, and this is genuinely playable and not a trick. He plans to release Notepad Doom to the public in the next couple days, if you would like to experience the black-and-white carnage for yourself. [Update: It’s available now!]

If you’re looking for a technical explanation of how Samperson got this running, I’m really not the guy for the job. But it appears Notepad is simply being used as the equivalent of a TV screen, while other software is doing all the real work of running the game and translating its visuals into a comprehensible text visualization for Notepad to display. Still, it’s yet another fun way that Doom has achieved a weird, weird immortality, and maybe you can give it a shot if you’ve played Doom Eternal to death.