Connecting the dots: DNS was introduced nearly 45 years ago as an early pillar of the internet, but it was never designed to store files, much less run programs. Since hackers learned to covertly deliver malware payloads via DNS records, naturally, someone reasoned that the system could also run Doom.
A recently released port of Doom can load into memory from Cloudflare without ever writing files to the disc. The project encodes the iconic first-person shooter's shareware version into 1,964 DNS TXT records, which boot the game via a PowerShell command.
Although DNS queries cannot store files, DNS zones can deliver thousands of text records, enough data to transmit files and run software with some clever coding. Last year, security researchers discovered that hackers were distributing malware piecemeal via hundreds of DNS subdomains before reassembling them with AI-generated scripts.
Coder Adam Rice used a fundamentally similar method to deliver Doom through a Cloudflare zone, broken up into 1,964 TXT records that reassemble into a PowerShell command. The port, which lacks audio, is based on Nobuaki Tanaka's C# version of Doom, Managed Doom, with Rice's Claude-assisted patches. Rice also compressed Doom from 8.4MB to 1.9MB.
To start playing Doom over DNS, simply install PowerShell 7 and enter the command ".\Start-DoomOverDNS.ps1 -PrimaryZone 'example.com'." Rice's GitHub page (linked above) contains detailed instructions for uploading the game and performing other commands. The game requires no other dependencies and never installs any software.
DNS is the latest in a growing list of unusually low-tech devices and other objects that people have coaxed into running Doom. Other things that run the FPS include:
- A single keyboard key
- The late John McAfee's "unhackable" crypto wallet
- A McDonald's cash register
- A McDonald's self-order kiosk
- The Playdate handheld
- Minecraft
- A captcha
- A $15 Ikea smart lamp
- A Motherboard
- A Lego brick
- John Deere combines
- Notepad
- The Atari ST
- A candy bar
- A one-milliwatt neural chip
- The Commodore 64
- Teletext
- A robot lawnmower
- Fortnite
- A self-generating AI model
- Holograms
- Nintendo's Alarmo clock
- A PDF document
- Microsoft Word
- An Anker power bank
- A satellite orbiting hundreds of kilometers above Earth
- The Windows screen saver
- Earbuds
- A computer made of living human neurons
- TypeScript's type system
- A box containing the game
- A QR code
Ports of Doom and Quake also recently emerged for the Analogue Pocket, with some help from Claude.
Although the handheld was designed to emulate the Game Boy Advance and numerous other retro consoles via FPGA, the Doom and Quake ports run natively and are not based on prior console editions. Although performance is not perfectly smooth, the Analogue Pocket probably handles the two games better than many PCs did in the 1990s.