The original DOOM is a sublime slice of retro gaming heaven that's gone on to inform and inspire the FPS genre, so it's no surprise that gamers around the world are still more than happy to pick up the 1993 classic over and over again as it's released for various platforms. It was, for example, a lovely surprise when DOOM hit current-gen consoles, but what about those looking for a more... unconventional way to play the game?
The good news is that various gamers around the world, presumably for no reason other than to prove they can do it, are often working to port DOOM to devices that DOOM ought not to be on. You might previously have seen the various versions of the demon-infested FPS running on a calculator, for example, but this latest port of the game might just take the crown for most imaginative version of DOOM to date.
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19-year-old Ryan Edgar now has the distinction of being the first, only, and quite possibly last human being to play DOOM on a McDonald's cash register. Kotaku reports that he was able to take an old cash register home when he visited a branch of the fast food giant which was in the process of replacing its old machines for new ones.
I had no idea McDonald's would just give away old cash registers, and I'm not sure I'll ever do anything useful with this information, but that's by the by.
Edgar told Kotaku that he took home his new find and decided to see if he could run DOOM on it. Quite how he arrived at this decision remains unclear, but he did, and that's what matters. The intrepid gamer explained he copied ZDOOM (a DOOM source port) onto a USB using his personal computer, suck his USB into the cash register, and ran the game through it with auto run.
"I was able to run explorer.exe by doing CTRL ALT DEL to get to Task Manager but there was some weird encryption on it," Edgar said. While he's not entirely sure what exact specs the terminal boasts, he suggested to Kotaku that he might actually start using it as his second computer, and will even see if he can get Sonic Adventure 2 running on it.
If it's good enough to run DOOM and Sonic Adventure 2 (which I guess remains to be seen) it certainly can't be that bad a bit of kit. If nothing else, he managed to walk into McDonald's and pick up a machine that's capable of playing some of the finest retro titles around, so that's pretty cool. Last time I went to McDonald's all I got was indigestion.
Featured Image Credit: Bethesda/McDonald'sTopics: DOOM
