In what might be the nerdiest crossover of gaming and space exploration ever, a programmer has officially run Doom on a satellite orbiting Earth. Yes, the same 1993 shooter that's been played on everything from calculators to pregnancy tests has now made its way into space, courtesy of a hacking challenge hosted by the European Space Agency.
The unlikely achievement came from Ólafur Waage, who shared the story during the recent Ubuntu Summit. His team took part in the ESA's OPS-SAT "flying laboratory" project, an initiative that invited developers to experiment with a small, decommissioned satellite designed for testing onboard computing systems. Measuring just 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, the OPS-SAT might be tiny, but it packed a computer ten times more powerful than any active ESA spacecraft at the time.
The ESA's goal was simple: give researchers free rein to push the system to its limits. Previous experiments on the satellite had already logged several firsts, including the first AI model trained in orbit, the first game of chess played in space, and even the first stock trade executed from orbit. But none of those quite had the same cultural cachet as getting Doom to run above the atmosphere.
It wasn't easy. The satellite's software environment was extremely limited, and teams were given narrow time slots to upload and execute code, with no real-time input. Waage's group first tried running Chocolate Doom, a faithful port that uses SDL for graphics and sound. It technically worked, but there was one small problem: the satellite didn't have a display. All they got was text output -- the end-level summary showing completion percentage and enemies defeated. Doom had run, but nobody could see it.
So, they tried again, this time using doomgeneric, a lightweight version of the game designed to be ported anywhere. The team created a virtual video card for output and managed to grab screenshots from orbit. Then came a stroke of genius: why not use the satellite's own camera to capture Earth and use those images as the game's background?
That creative idea turned Doom into a cosmic masterpiece, though not without complications. The satellite's camera captured photos in ultra-high resolution and bit depth, far beyond what the 8-bit game engine could handle. To fix that, the team used an onboard AI model developed by another research group to resize and compress the images without losing too much color detail.
The end result? Doom, rendered in space, against the backdrop of our planet. It's poetic, really -- the game that's run on every screen imaginable has now conquered the final frontier.