Thanks to Doom, I can finally solve captcha prompts without wanting to spoon my eyeballs out and wander into the wilderness

SoftwareThanks to Doom, I can finally solve captcha prompts without wanting to spoon my eyeballs out and wander into the wildernessWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Vercel)

Doom Captcha on a colourful orange and yellow background

Captchas have been making me want to spoon my eyes out for years, so praise be to Vercel CEOGuillermo Rauchwho’s just yeeted aDoom captchainto virtual existence (viaHackaday).

Since it was made open source, the 1992 shooter has been designated a veritable “can you run it” of potato hardware, finding its way ontoteletext,volumetric displays, and even insideDoom itself(so you can gib while you gib).

So why nobody thought to make it a captcha until now boggles my mind, but I’m glad it’s finally been done. We had aDoom-themedonebefore, but not one that was actually Doom.

The Doom captcha is a WebAssembly app, which runs low-level code in-browser, and it runs mighty fine based on my testing.

Testing which may or may not have confirmed I’m an awful gamer, as I failed over and over again to kill the three enemies required to “prove I’m human”. I guess all those calling me a bot in Counter-Strike had a point.

It’s a traditional arrows-and-spacebar affair, too. So be prepared to hearken back to CRT-era muscle memory—if such memory still sits in your brain bank—if you want to see those pixels spatter. Oh, and if you want to prove you’re a human being.

The only question is whether and where this captcha will be used. I’d personally like to see donned on some very serious, official-looking websites. Government ones, perhaps? There’s so much that could be done. “Rip and tear into the online portal”, etc. etc. Hop on it, webdevs.

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