How to play “Doom” as CAPTCHA

Doom may be over 30 years old, but people aren’t sick of it yet. On the contrary: Fans have ported the action-horror game to just about every platform imaginableout of Graphing calculator And Treadmills To Pregnancy tests. If it has a screen, it can probably run Doom.

Given this, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the latest port of Doom is designed to run in your internet browser. In fact, there are probably dozens of ways to access the original Doom on-line. What’s special about this version, however, is that you don’t just play in a browser window, but in a CAPTCHA window.

CAPTCHAs, of course, are the tiny challenges you face when trying to access something on the web, designed to prove that you are actually a human and not an automated bot. Some of the earliest CAPTCHAs asked you to enter a distorted series of characters – something a robot (or perhaps these days, a generative AI bot) would have difficulty bypassing. Since then, these types of challenges have evolved to cover a wide range of puzzles and tasks. This now also includes a playable version of Doom.

Doom is surprisingly fun as a CAPTCHA

As reported by TechCrunchThe 1993-style CAPTCHA was created by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. The company happens to have an AI website builder, which Rauch used to create this port. You can try it out for yourself here.

Although the game came out over three decades ago and this version only offers a snippet of the entire experience, this CAPTCHA version of Doom Is not simply. The goal is simply to kill three enemies before the enemies kill you. Use the arrow keys to move forward, backward, left and right, and use the space bar to shoot. That’s it. However, as soon as you move forward, the enemies start shooting at you and death is within your grasp.

One reason for the difficulty is the sheer amount of firepower coming at you from all directions. The CAPTCHA is set in a small arena, with a horde of monsters in a cage in the middle, all hurling fire in your direction. There are four corridors leading out of the arena with even more enemies shooting at you.

How to hit Doom: CAPTCHA Edition

From my brief experience with this CAPTCHA, I can give three pieces of advice: The first is to hold down the space bar to fire as many shots as possible. DOOM Accuracy isn’t important, so your goal is simply to face an enemy while shooting to hit them. The second is to ignore the enemies in the middle cage: there are just too many of them and you’ll quickly be overrun by fire. It’s better to run past and try to eliminate the enemies in one of the corridors. Since the monsters in the cage fire after you, they can hit and kill some of the enemies in the corridors, which doesn’t add to your kill requirements but gives you a split second of breathing room to target another enemy.

Finally, I recommend doing at least one rotation and walking around the cage as often as possible. You last longer than you would expect and you get to watch the monsters in the cage mow you down tonne from corridor enemies. Play your cards right and you can use this tactic to get three kills yourself and win the CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, since there is no website to visit, you won’t win anything other than the game inside. At least you’ve proven that you’re human.

As TechCrunch points out, this isn’t even the first time Doom has been ported to CAPTCHA. Miquel Camps Orteza made the game a CAPTCHA back in 2021but this offer was much more limited. Instead of being able to walk around a small map, this CAPTCHA simply required you to pick off immobile enemies one by one until you reached the four-kill quota. If you prefer Doom: CAPTCHA For more challenges and higher stakes, stick with Smoke.