Someone has uploaded a cloned variant of DOOM, the 30-year-old video game classic, to the Bitcoin blockchain as an input to the network’s NFT protocol, Ordinals, to the delight of crypto circles on Twitter and Reddit.
DOOM variant on Bitcoin
A cheap DOOM variant was permanently pegged to a single Satoshi via block 774526, which was then added to the blockchain Wednesday morning thanks to an inherent loophole enabled by Bitcoin’s Taproot update pushed in November 2021.
https://twitter.com/hlopez_/status/1621194945167241216
Being written in Bitcoin means that the functional game will live forever on the immutable blockchain. As long as the network is online, players will be able to play this version of DOOM.
While web browsers are still required to compile the code, the pressure on unconventional innovations to run DOOM is already a meme in tech culture.
DOOM has been programmed to run pregnancy tests, calculators, ATMs, smart watches, toasters, and Pelotons, among other strange channels.
While the clone is funny in its own way and basic, it looks like an actual copy of the original DOOM is about to hit the Bitcoin blockchain soon.
Meanwhile, ordinals continue to be a topic of discussion among Bitcoiners as the community deciphers what the introduction of NFTs into the older blockchain implies for the coming years of the network and the NFT ecosystem in general.
Specifically, the protocol just enabled the mining of the largest Bitcoin blockchain in history. This week, a high-resolution “Taproot wizard” subscribed to a satoshi, resulting in a 3.96 MB transaction, close to the Bitcoin block size limit of 4 MB (originally 1 MB, but scalable via SegWit).
The DOOM ordinal was only 31.2 KB in size.
Game details
Created by Nicholas Carlini, the game is registered with Bitcoin as Inscription 466 and can be played with a keyboard and mouse.
It is a simplistic imitation of Doom and lacks the gory, pixelated impact of the influential original, but offers a taste of what is possible with Ordinals. An improved version has since been inscribed.
It also adds a new level to the ever-expanding “It Runs Doom” meme, in which people attempt to run the game on just about any gadget or device they can find, be it an ATM, a fridge, a smartwatch, and more.
There is even a subreddit dedicated to this activity, followed by more than 94,000 Reddit users.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized, permissionless blockchain, and the ability to store content on it makes it a unique historical record.
The Ordinal Theory Handbook argues that Bitcoin entries, like the clone game Doom, are better than NFTs, which are unique blockchain tokens (typically ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum) that indicate ownership of associated metadata that in many cases is stored off-chain centrally.
Each Bitcoin entry through Ordinals is referred to as a “digital artifact” because it is complete and decentralized in itself.
It is immutable, unlike most NFTs, whose metadata can be modified or even deleted by the creator.
Since its launch in January, Ordinals has already caused a stir in the Bitcoin community, as maximalists and devotees have debated whether any content should be uploaded to Bitcoin.
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