DOOM Runs in… R?!

DOOM is getting closer to my sensitive spot.

DOOM Now Runs in R?!

Incorrigibly persistent readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) know that we’ve followed with some amusement the attempts to port the game DOOM to increasingly absurd hardware platforms (e.g., PDF files with internal Javascript, the Domain Name System, and so on).

Up until now, it’s all been good, clean fun. On somebody else’s platform.

But now… they’ve made it run (using FFI, which cheating, but only sorta) under the statistical language R, which has been the tool of my trade in the latter half of my career, and my main data-hacking tool in retirement for about a quarter century.

It’s personal now.

From coolbutuseless comes a GitHub repository rdoom. ^[1] As announced on BlueSky:

On the one hand, there’s less here than one might think: it uses the doomgeneric game engine running as native code, and interfaces to it in various clever ways. (Demo .wad file included; others work, you just have to go dig them up.)

On the other hand, there’s more here than one might think: the tigerfb R package for frame buffers, the nara R package for native raster image support, and the audio package for all those disturbing sounds.

So… a lot of work, and… “cool but useless” as the author’s pseudonym leads us to believe.

The Weekend Conclusion

As the Devil Girl from Mars (exceptionally bad British movie from 1954, about… never mind) would have said: “Huh?” (See the Devil Girl Bot on Mastodon.)

DOOM. In R. We’re all… doomed.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

---

Notes & References

1: ‘coolbutuseless’, “rdoom”, GitHub repository, retrieved 2026-Jul-15. ↩