Can It Run Doom? Yes. Everything Can Run Doom.

Someone just ran Doom on a pregnancy test using an ESP32.

Congratulations. It's a space marine. And before you say 'that's ridiculous' — yes. That's exactly the point.

Because here's the thing about Doom: since 1993, hackers have been running it on literally everything. Not because they need to. Because they can. And because the question 'can it run Doom?' has become the unofficial benchmark for whether a piece of hardware is actually interesting.

The Official Hall of Fame

🖥️ A pregnancy test — this week's entry. The display is barely visible and completely worth it.

🏧 An ATM machine — exploited the firmware, raised security questions, didn't care.

⌚ A smartwatch — tiny screen, cumbersome controls, still did it.

📷 A digital camera — point and shoot, literally.

🌡️ A thermostat — Doom is set in hell. It fits.

🖨️ A printer — the control panel display. Of course.

🧫 E. coli bacteria — rendered one frame. Took hours. Full game would take 500 years.

🧮 A TI-83 graphing calculator — students have been doing this since the dawn of time.

🍟 A McDonald's cash register — probably a fireable offense. Worth it.

🐬 A Flipper Zero — the devs knew this was coming and just included it.

And now: a pregnancy test. Running an ESP32. In 2026.

Why This Actually Matters

Outside of being absolutely hilarious, the Doom-on-everything phenomenon is about something real.

It's the same instinct that drives every great hardware hack: look at a piece of technology and ask 'what else could this do?'

That question — asked seriously, with curiosity and a soldering iron — is how weird projects become real products. It's how $5 microcontrollers become cognitive tools. It's how idle hands on a rainy Sunday build something that matters six months later. The Doom-on-everything phenomenon isn't about Doom. It's about the kind of brain that refuses to accept that hardware has a fixed purpose.

Those brains are worth paying attention to.

The E. Coli Footnote (Please Read This)

Someone actually rendered Doom inside a petri dish of E. coli bacteria. One frame at a time. Each frame takes hours. The full game would take approximately 500 years to render. They did it anyway. I don't have anything to add to that. It speaks for itself.

The Takeaway

Every device on this list was 'not designed for this.' Every hack was unnecessary. Every engineer who did it was told, implicitly or explicitly, that this was not what the hardware was for. They did it anyway. And the world is a slightly more interesting place because of it.

If you're the kind of person who looks at a pregnancy test and thinks 'I wonder if I could run a first-person shooter on that' — you're exactly the kind of person who's going to build something important. Keep going.

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