A Dutch software developer has adapted DOOM, the iconic first-person shooter, to run inside a standalone Microsoft Word document with some help from VBA macros.
Wojciech Graj, the brains behind this undertaking, shared the source code for his “doom generic” port on GitHub. He was inspired to create the project after seeing DOOM running inside a PDF document. The game comes as a single 6.6MB Word document. However, there’s no sound, and you must allow Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros.
The whole thing looks remarkably similar to the original DOOM game in terms of the visuals and gameplay. If the video of it in action is anything to go by, DOOM plays just like the original version, only inside Word. The resolution is the original 320 x 200 pixels to keep it running smoothly and responsively. If you’ve played DOOM before, you know the drill. Press the arrow keys to move, select your weapons with the number keys 1-7, fire the selected weapon with the Control key, and hit the Space key for interaction.
The port wouldn’t work in the last Word version available as part of my Microsoft 365 subscription. I followed the instructions and downloaded the document from the latest Github release, opened the file on my 2018 Intel-based MacBook Pro, and approved the prompt to enable VBA macros but got an error message instead saying the data couldn’t be loaded. I should have read the instructions more attentively, as Wojciech spells out in back and white that the document must be opened on a Windows PC with an x86 CPU architecture and running a modern version of Microsoft Word or the Office suite.
The developer notes that Windows users may also encounter issues as Microsoft Defender will want to prevent extracting and running DLLs from within the Word document. Also, older Word versions like Word 2007 may fail to run this DOOM port. “The Word document contains the library doomgeneric_docm.dll and doom1.wad game data encoded in base 64, which a VBA macro extracts onto the disk and then loads,” he said. The DLLs render the frame as a bitmap image, with the rest handled by the WBA macro.
This isn’t Wojciech’s first such project. His personal page highlights his other ports that permit DOOM to run in ASCII mode in terminal, inside MS Paint, Libreoffice Calc, Minecraft: Pi Edition, and Stardew Valley. There’s even one playable over an audio connection. DOOM has been ported to run on various hardware, including quantum computers and Redbox kiosks—if it has a screen or a stream, it can probably run DOOM.
Source: GitHub via Tom’s Hardware
