Protect Your Site With A DOOM Captcha

We all know that “Can it run DOOM?” is the first question of a hardware hacker. The 1993 first person shooter from id Software defined an entire genre of games, and has since been made open source, appearing on almost everything. Everything, that is, except a Captcha, those annoying “Are you a human” tests where we’re all expected to do a search giant’s image classification for them. So here’s [Guillermo Rauch] with a DOOM captcha, in which you must gun down three bad guys to proceed.

As a way to prove you’re a human we can’t imagine a more fitting test than indiscriminate slaughter, and it’s interesting to read a little about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s a WebAssembly application as you might have guessed, and while it’s difficult to shake that idea from the early ’90s that you needed a powerful computer to run the game, in reality it shows just how powerful WebAssembly is, as well as how far we’ve come in three decades.

We’d prefer a few different entry points instead of always playing the same level, and we were always more handy with the mouse than the keyboard back in the day, but it’s certainly a bit of fun. It’s worth noting that simply playing the game isn’t enough to verify your humanity — if you’re killed in the game before vanquishing the required three foes, you’ll have to start over. As the game is running at “Nightmare” difficulty, proving your worth might be a tad harder than you’d expect…

Need more DOOM? How about seeing it on hardware nobody would have believed in 1993?

25 thoughts on “Protect Your Site With A DOOM Captcha

    1. Hehe,.. It is so true to the original that even the cheat codes work :)
      It’s a nice novelty captcha that would be quite fun if it popped up occasionally but would get pretty tiring after a couple of times in a row..

      1. Interestingly though if you do enable god mode and give yourself all weapons, it takes a lot more than three kills to pass. Glad to find that I managed three kills on my second try, so it seems all those hours spent 30 years ago have developed a pointless skill in playing Doom.

  1. Remember when captchas involved reading wonky text, and the eventual result was that OCR got really good at reading wonky text? And all the stuff about how identifying traffic lights and bicycles in bad street view pictures was actually a sneaky way to teach self-driving AIs? Now we’re making captchas that require you to be good at running around in a 3D environment and shooting things?

  2. Capped-ya.

    But I agree with Norman, above. Let’s not encourage any more of these damned things.
    I have enough trouble with the fifty piece bicycle guessing, never mind those eFing crosswalk ones. It’s a picture of New York, there are thousands of crosswalks, but yet I get failed for clicking the big city images? :P
    Ebay used to be bad to toss them in my face.
    I just closed the page every time and looked elsewhere if possible.
    Maybe someone at ebay finally figured out that No money is spent when they block the customers??
    Gotta love a gmail screen saying to try again with the same pc, same browser, same IP address, etc.. as last time logged in. When I was on all of the same kit & such as before.

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