Classic Video Game Doom Now Powers Scientific Breakthroughs

A 30-year-old video game is helping scientists make breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and neuroscience, proving that play and research make perfect partners.

Since 1993, the classic first-person shooter game Doom has quietly become a favorite tool in research labs worldwide. Scientists have used it to improve AI models, study how video games affect memory, and most recently, teach neurons grown on a silicon chip to play the game.

The team at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, chose Doom specifically because of an internet meme asking "Can it run Doom?" Alon Loeffler, a synthetic biological intelligence scientist on the team, says the choice was natural after they successfully taught neurons to play Pong in 2021. Doom offered a more complex environment to test their growing understanding of biological intelligence.

The game's popularity in science comes from a generous decision in 1997. Developer John Carmack published the game's code online, allowing anyone to adapt it for different platforms and devices. The game also requires minimal storage space, making it perfect for creative experiments.

Researchers have gotten wonderfully inventive with Doom. Fans have made it run on everything from calculators to digital pregnancy tests. At MIT, doctoral student Lauren Ramlan used E. coli bacteria to display frames from the game, attaching fluorescent proteins to bacterial cells that acted like black and white pixels.

Why This Inspires

Mars Buttfield-Addison, a software developer and PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, says the Doom subculture reflects how crucial play is to scientific discovery. The same creativity needed to make something silly is exactly what researchers use to solve complex technical problems. "Making something silly doesn't take any less work than making something really technical," she explains.

The playful approach keeps scientists motivated and engaged. When research feels like fun, breakthrough moments become more likely.

Doom isn't alone in the gaming-meets-science world. Minecraft helps develop AI models, while World of Warcraft has been used to simulate disease outbreaks. But Doom's open-source nature and minimal requirements keep it at the forefront of experimental research.

From teaching neurons to think to displaying pixels on bacteria, this decades-old game continues opening new doors in laboratories around the globe.