DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even inside Microsoft Word itself.

The problem is that porting Doom has kind of jumped the shark at this point. Just about every modern microcontroller or piece of consumer electronics these days has enough grunt to run a simple faux-3D game engine from 1993. It’s been done very much to death at this point. The time has come for a new meme port!

Good Game

Doom became a popular meme port for multiple reasons. For one, it’s just complex and resource-intensive enough to present a challenge, without being so demanding as to make ports impractical or impossible. It’s also been open-source for decades, and the engine has been hacked to death. It’s probably one of the best understood game engines out there at this point. On top of that, everybody plays Doom at some point, and it was one of the biggest games of the 90s. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect meme port.

However, you can always have too much of a good thing. Just as The Simpsons got old after season 10 and Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party, Doom ports have been overdone. But what other options are there?

Quake

While Doom is credited as a groundbreaking first-person shooter, it doesn’t have that much in common with the genre as we know it today. It merely created the illusion of a 3D environment with clever 2D tricks, and didn’t have the free-rolling mouselook that we now take for granted. Released in 1996, Quake was a real step forward. The game featured real-time 3D rendering, making it a far more demanding game for mid-1990s computers to run.

Compared to Doom, Quake’s fully-3D engine presents a more demanding challenge for those trying to port it to unusual hardware. At the same time, like Doom, the engine’s source code has been available under an open-source license since 1999. Thus, it’s readily available to anyone who wishes to tinker with it. It’s also a widely-popular game well embedded in the broader hacker consciousness. If your friends are showing off their Doom ports, pulling off a Quake port is an easy way to one-up them.

Half-Life/Counter-Strike

If Quake is still too old for your tastes, you might find Half-Life more relevant. Released in 1999, it became popular for its rich science-fiction plot and compelling gameplay. Funnily enough, Half-Life ran on the GoldSrc engine, which was developed and heavily modified from the original Quake engine. Most crucially, it added robust AI and skeletal animation features, which brought the FPS genre to new levels of immersion. Half Life soon became a popular basis for mods, spawning the immensely-successful Counter Strike amongst many others.

The source code for GoldSrc was never officially released, but the engine is well understood and has been reverse-engineered by numerous projects like Xash3D and FreeHL. These community-created engines could provide a solid starting point for any porting efforts.

You won’t have much luck getting a full-version of Half-Life running on a space-constrained platform—the game took up over 250 MB of disk space, compared to Quake, at under 80 MB, and Doom, which fit on a couple of floppy disks. Still, it’s not supposed to be easy—it’s supposed to be hard! With that said, few people expect you to include a full single-player game with a meme port. Usually, one playable level is enough. In Half-Life’s case, maybe that could be the mind-numbing unskippable intro that has you riding a tram for twenty minutes. Alternatively, do a multiplayer Counter-Strike port that lets you run around de_dust. That should be enough.

Crysis: The Impossible Flex

Ah, Crysis. The tropical jungle game that brought high-end PCs to their knees when it launched in 2007. For over a decade, “But can it run Crysis?” was a tongue-in-cheek benchmark for computing power. If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a reskin of a much older saying—”Can it run DOOM?” For this reason alone, it deserves a mention here.

The problem with Crysis is that it’s a thoroughly modern game with thoroughly modern requirements. Running on CryEngine2, it featured advanced lighting, motion blur and depth of field effects, and even a multi-threaded physics engine that let you blast chunks out of the environment. Getting even a heavily downscaled version of Crysis running on inappropriate hardware would thus be the ultimate flex in the hardware hacking community.

Crysis followed Far Cry, continuing Crytek’s theme of putting its name in the title of its games, and its focus on building games in tropical environs. 

There’s just one problem—source code for Crysis nor CryEngine 2 was ever really released to the public. The closest you could get is the open-source Open 3D engine, which is related to CryEngine by a few degrees of separation. Without the source, it’s hard to really port at all. You could remake Crysis on whatever platform you like, but it’s not really the same thing.

Ultimately, though, this just ups the challenge. You need to be charismatic enough, rich enough, or a good enough thief, to get the source code out of Crytek’s archives in the first place. Then you can pull off the meme port to end all meme ports.

Why Bother?

Impractical ports aren’t about actually playing a game on weird hardware. Sure, a few people might have enjoyed tapping around Doom on an iPod, but by and large, that’s beyond the point. They do, however, serve several purposes beyond just bragging rights. In reality, they’re a test of skill, and a way to explore what’s really possible on a random piece of hardware. Can you play Half Life on a Toyota infotainment system from 2022? Well, there’s one good way to find out!

The next time you’re looking at your smart dishwasher and thinking about making it run Doom, consider aiming higher. Your project might take longer and cause more headaches, but imagine the satisfaction when you’ve got Gordon Freeman fighting headcrabs on your smart TV, or Trent Reznor’s Quake soundtrack pumping out of your e-reader. Doom is great, but it’s been done. It’s time to move on!