You Can Now Play DOOM In Microsoft Word Document

Inspired by seeing DOOM run inside a PDF, Wojciech Graj got curious about other document formats and, in his experimental mood, created a DOOM port that runs directly within a standalone MS Word document.

If you'd like to give it a try, head over to the project's GitHub page for setup instructions. You'll need a Windows system with an x64 CPU architecture, the latest version of Microsoft Word, and the document itself. Other than that, it plays just like regular DOOM. Unfortunately, there's no sound, but given all the different ways people have played DOOM over the years, the soundtrack is probably already etched in your mind.

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. Every game tick, doomgeneric.dll creates a BMP image containing the current frame and uses GetAsyncKeyState to read the keyboard state. The main VBA macro's game loop runs a tick in DOOM and then replaces the image in the document with the latest frame.

We all know the rule: if it has a screen, DOOM can be played on it. That said, it does make you wonder what platform people will manage to port it to next.

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