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ZDNET's key takeaways
- A hacker with some help from the ESA got Doom to run on a satellite.
- This was built on years of open-source Doom being ported to every computing device you can conceive of.
- The experiment showed off open-source software's adaptability
LONDON: Say it with me, say it loud. "Doom in Space!" You can almost hear the reverb, can't you? Doom, the 1993 game that was once installed on more computers than Windows, is famous for several reasons, including jump-starting the first-person shooter genre and running on pretty much every computing platform you can imagine. This includes everything from lawnmowers to iPods to supercomputers. There are even efforts afoot to get Doom to run on quantum computers.
Recently, Doom moved to space, the final frontier.
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Ólafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now works in Norway, explained at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 how he, a self-described "professional keyboard typist" and maker of funny videos, ended up making what is perhaps the game's most outlandish port yet: Doom running on a real satellite in orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite.
OPS-SAT, a "flying laboratory" for testing novel onboard computing techniques, was equipped with an experimental computer approximately 10 times more powerful than the norm for spacecraft. Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft." (The satellite was decommissioned in 2024.)
Doom has been open-sourced since 1997. A few weeks later, I began playing on Linux. It's a natural choice for porting it to a spacecraft, as its C code is simple.
Running Doom in orbit was partly a challenge of portability and partly a challenge of the limitations of space hardware and mission control. The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards.
Waage chose Chocolate Doom 2.3, a popular open-source version of Doom, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distro, which was already running on OPS-SAT. Besides, Waage noted, "We picked Chocolate Doom 2.3 because of the libraries available for 18.04 -- that was the last one that would actually build.
Updating software in orbit is extremely difficult, so relatively little code would have to be uploaded. As Waage said, "Doom is relatively straightforward C with a few external dependencies." In other words, it's easy to port.
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To start with, Waage ran the space Doom on the same hardware that was in orbit on the ground. It took a little fine-tuning, but it worked well. Then, a few days after Christmas 2019, he successfully ran Doom on the satellite. War in space and bad will to demons.
Of course, some things had to change from your usual Doom experience. For one thing, there were no graphics on the satellite. I mean, it's not a gaming console in space. So, all the graphics had to be done in software. Even after optimization, the frame rate was nothing to write home about. But, hey, it was better than playing Doom in SQL.
The experiment relied heavily on pre-recorded demo files, which enabled space Doom to play back complete levels using deterministic input sequences. This ensured that any deviation caused by stray radiation (bit flips) could be detected, since the game's output would not match the expected results. This approach had the added benefit of getting some actual science in the experiment. "The idea was to run as many demo files as possible, comparing output from space and from Earth," recounted Waage.
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Waage described the process: "We made the RNG (Random Number) table huge and checked if single events could impact gameplay. In simulation, yes; in space, unfortunately, no. But that was our actual plan for the project; sometimes experiments don't work, but that's why OPS-SAT existed."
The only sign that Doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry. So, the team used the satellite's camera to snap real-time images of the Earth, then swapped Doom's Mars skybox for actual satellite photos. "The idea was to take a screenshot from the satellite and use that as the sky, all rendered in software using the game's restricted 256-color palette," explained Waage.
Even this posed unexpected difficulties: "Trying to draw all of these beautiful colors with those colors," said Waage, "it's probably not going to work right off. But we tried gradient tests, NASA demo photos. It took quite a bit of tweaking." Eventually, instead of a fantasy Mars as the sky background, they got a good-looking, real Earth in the game's sky.
The game itself ran flawlessly. After all, Waage said, "It ran beautifully. It's on Ubuntu."
So, why do this? Well, first, because we can and it's cool.
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You want a better reason? OK, Waage explained that such projects aren't just for fun -- they demonstrate the adaptability of open-source software, space hardware, and the international collaboration driving modern research. OPS-SAT's mission was specifically to lower the barriers for experimenting in orbit, enabling creative crossovers between software engineering and space science.
As Waage summed up: "The mission is to make it easy for anyone to propose and run innovative experiments. Running Doom may seem trivial, but it proves our infrastructure and builds global interest for future missions."
Since then, the Polish company KP Labs has also successfully run Doom on its Intuition-1 satellite. This used the company's Leopard Data Processing Unit to run Doom while simultaneously capturing hyperspectral images of Earth.
Looking ahead, there's another OPS-SAT VOLT satellite launch scheduled for next year. That satellite is focused on quantum communications.
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Nevertheless, Waage hopes to port Doom to it to achieve new heights. Doom's orbital journey continues to inspire world-class engineering and internet culture alike. It's also still just a heck of a lot of fun to play if you enjoy some good old-fashioned mindless demon blasting.
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