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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: ESA<\/p>\n
If you thought running the classic 1993 shooter Doom on a medical ultrasound scanner<\/a> was ridiculous, this next one will have you in orbit. <\/p>\n According to ZDnet<\/a>, an Icelandic software developer named \u00d3lafur Waage has successfully ported Doom to run on the European Space Agency\u2019s (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. Specifically, Waage hacked the OPS-SAT\u2019s flight computer, which is \u201c10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft,\u201d as The Register <\/a>puts it<\/a>.<\/p>\n While Doom enthusiasts have for years hacked the Id Software classic to run on a staggering array of earth-bound objects, from a nicotine vape<\/a> to the MacBook Pro Touch Bar<\/a> to a Samsung washing machine<\/a> to human gut bacteria<\/a>, the game \u2014 famously set on Mars \u2014 had yet to leave the troposphere.<\/p>\n Before we blast off, an important caveat: a lot of headline grabbing Doom ports aren\u2019t technically \u201crunning\u201d the game at all. Some of them, like the infamous pregnancy test experiment<\/a>, simply use an exotic device\u2019s screen as an output, while an external computer processes the game\u2019s code.<\/p>\n This one is different \u2014 and likely one of the most expensive Doom ports to date. As ZDNet tells it, Waage had a little help from some high-powered friends, like ESA engineer Georges Labr\u00e8che.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was as much a work of his as it was mine and the whole ESA team,\u201d Waage said of the achievement<\/a> at the latest Ubuntu Summit.<\/p>\n In a video summarizing the whole experiment, Waage explains that the satellite technically has no screen, and that \u201ceven if it did, it would take a pretty good telescope to see what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n Initially, the team wrote a script for the satellite\u2019s computer to update mission control with the current stats of the Doom demo, where the game simulates a player running through a pre-set number of actions, like slaying enemies, picking up items, and discovering secret locations.<\/p>\n \u201cA text output saying you ran Doom is nice, but it\u2019s not nice enough,\u201d the programmer said. \u201cWhat we wanted was a screenshot of the satellite playing Doom.\u201d<\/p>\n The only wrinkle was that OPS-SAT has no graphics card, meaning it wasn\u2019t capable of generating any footage the way computers do on Earth. However, the satellite does have an on-board camera facing the ground \u2014 and that gave the programmers some ideas.<\/p>\n Using some orbital software wizardry, the team rejiggered OPS-SAT\u2019s camera to spit out a screenshot of the gameplay at specific times, paring down the pixels into a color range fitting Doom\u2019s 1993 limitations. For an added bonus, they ran a script to replace the in-game sky with an actual live image taken of the Earth, leading to some visually arresting material.<\/p>\n \t\t While Waage technically hacked the satellite to get Doom running, his work wasn\u2019t malicious. OPS-SAT is described as a \u201cflying laboratory\u201d meant to enable orbital computing experiments like this one. The craft boasts a number of similar \u201cfirsts,\u201d according to Waage, including the first digital chess game<\/a> in orbit and the first stock market trade<\/a> executed in space.<\/p>\n \u201cThe point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft,\u201d Waage explained.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761955149_735_hqdefault.jpg\"\/)
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