alt Hacker NewsWhats the fascination with Doom? I keep seeing running Doom on this and that and now Rats playing Doom. I mean ok, Doom runs on everything and now rats playing doom. So what?
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Doom pioneered the FPS genre in the USA. So it has a cultural significance. I used to go to my friends house to play it. You deal with a whole range of aspects such as grapchics, sound, networking,.. Etc. So it's a fun challange for hackers to try to get it to work in the most strange of ways. In addition it's a simple goal (with a complex path). So it helps with the focus, and most importantly the fun programming challenges involved in making the game work.
Why do videos go viral? Why do memes become memes?
Doom was a big milestone in video game history and 90s tech culture.
one of the first widely known "3d" shooters. Doesn't require much in the way of hardware and there are lots of open source implementations , tools and mods for it. And it's a meme
Doom has some star power and is instantly recognizable to pretty much anyone, not just video game fans. Its engine is Free software that's easily adaptable to pretty much any input or output method. In this case Doom might also have made a better candidate than another first person shooter because you can't aim up or down in Doom, so there's no need to account for that in the rats' input.