If you think of it, they will find a way to run Doom on it. Albeit a touch slowly.
Not the most serious story (in a way) this one, and with full credit to Rock Paper Shotgun, following on from people running Doom on everything from calculators to pregnancy tests, one enterprising researcher has worked out how to play Doom on bacteria. No, really…
OK, there are some caveats. The Bacteria here are acting as the display screen for Doom, not the processing platform, even though (by modern standards) the computing power to run Doom isn’t all that much.
The big catch here is the frame rate. For most FPS games, at least 30FPS (frames per second) is desirable, and more is always better. Calculating it out, Doom on e.coli bacteria runs at roughly… (deep breath)
0.000033467202142 fps.
Not fast, that. Around 8 hours and 18 minutes per frame, so you’d be there a while — as Lauren Ramlan points out in that exceptional video, you’d be there around 600 years from start to finish — and I suspect that’s for a perfect run.
It would truly suck to lose a life halfway through a level and realise you’ve just added another 10 years to completion, now wouldn’t it?
Doom is a retro gaming classic, and a game I still return to on a regular basis, because while it’s had many sequels and inspired much of a genre of gaming, there’s still something to its simple, frantic action that I find deeply appealing. But I think I’ll stick to playing it on a PC for the most part.
Lead image: Lauren Ramlan/ID Software
