There are many iconic and historical games that have marked the video game industry. But, one of the highlights of the story is Doomnot only for being iconic or having jumped to the movies, but also for being run on dozens of different systems. The last? Well, it has been possible play on teletext from an old television.
Reviewing the most important games in history is a very complicated and almost infinite task. Surely, any list that is made will be incomplete, since some of us will forget. Crysis marked an era for being ahead of its time. Spyro or Castlevania for the PlayStation were an innovative bet. Minecraft is another of the great games.
None, can be compared to the Doom phenomenon. This FPS game, which was released in 1993, has been run on a wide variety of systems. Calculators, John Deere combines, a McDonald’s self-service display, and even Windows Notepad.
Doom expands the list of systems where it has been executed
You probably don’t know the teletext Or you don’t know what it’s for. This system, which for years was used to watch television programming or be informed, today it is in disuse. Although it is still available and functional, it has been replaced by the immediacy of the internet and smartphones.
He modder lukneu has managed to adapt Doom to be executed on teletext. It has even published all the information so that anyone can run it.
It has a trick and it is that the game is run on a computer, but the image is transmitted to a device that can display teletext. We will see simple black and white graphicswith an optimized graphical interface.
Modifying the game has required changing the Doomguy’s face to a simple smiley face. This has been necessary so that it can be executed.
According to lukneu, he could have created a more detailed game. The thing is that it has wanted to be faithful to teletext level 1 introduced in 1976. This makes the characters simpler and more authentic feeling.
One of the funniest aspects is that we can play it with the television remote control itself. Although it presents a problem and it is the existing latency time, something that is detrimental for an action game like Doom.
But there is more and that is that lukneu says that this is only the first version. He has said that he is working on new features, such as support for automaps, color graphics, ASCII characters, and a rendering mode that only draws borders.
Beta phase that will improve
Currently, Teletext Doom development is intended to be run on Linux. He has published a very complete GitHub repository with all the information. Replicating the same so that it works on Windows or other platforms is not excessively complicated and we will surely see it soon.
Note that to play this version of Domm a WAD file is required. Lukneu has used a shareware version of the game, but states that any WAD that doesn’t change the UI or level names should work.
