Doom Can Now Be Played Through Twitter

You can now play Doom through Twitter. No, we're not joking -- you can use the popular social media platform to play Doom!

By Jason Collins | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

doom twitter

For quite some time now, the fans of the classic Doom video game, initially released in 1993, have ensured that their favorite title has become available across several platforms. The game was so successful in its heyday that it still continues to receive ports to various modern platforms, including smart refrigerators and even pregnancy tests. Some of those ports might seem elegant or crude depending on the viewpoint, but the fact is – Doom is becoming playable on everything!

The classic first-person shooter even became playable on Twitter. According to Kotaku, the new Tweet2Doom bot allows Twitter users to play the game via short commands and videos. How? Well, the bot lets you play the original game using a series of commands. When typed in, those commands get translated to the bot, and users receive a video showing the results of their previously issued commands. In addition, users can issue individual commands or string them together as they’re progressing through levels of the original Doom video game.

In addition to stringing individual commands into a sequence, users can replay to each other Tweet commands and turn-base control the game’s protagonist, aptly named Doom Guy. It’s worth noting that the game hasn’t been completed on Twitter yet, but with nearly three decades of experience, someone will eventually speed-run through it. Such runs already exist, though they’re level-based, as users currently compete in record-breaking level runs. In fact, someone has already set a pretty respectable completion time for the game’s first level – one user used only two commands and completed the entire first level of the game in 11 seconds.  

If you follow the Tweet2Doom account, you won’t just get access to the game via Twitter; you’ll also be informed whenever users set new records or perform record-breaking speed runs. But it’s not all about fast-paced shooting, blood, and violence. The handle also posts a random collection of people just messing around with Tweet2Doom, in attempts to issue commands and make progress within the game. Tweet2Doom now joins a long and ever-growing list of Ways to Play Doom, which involves some pretty well-thought-out science projects that would most definitely impress physics and chemistry teachers worldwide.

The original Doom was released in 1993 and quickly rose to become one of the most influential video games ever created. In truth, the concept was taken from 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D video game, dubbed “the grandfather of 3D shooters”, as the game featured all the fun elements – fast-paced shooter action enabled by technical advancements of the time. However, when it comes to the game’s narrative, the design team took elements from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, combined with styles of the well-established Alien franchise and Evil Dead II film.

Doom was both a critical and commercial success, giving birth to an entire franchise of fast-paced shooter games, which collectively sold over 10 million copies by 2016 when a rebooted Doom series came out. The reboot was laced with the same fast-paced elements throughout the reimagined origin story, which later continued in Doom Eternal, and concluded in Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part 2, coming full circle with the beginning of the story. However, it would seem that Twitter got there first, and users can now play the original game from their smartphones in more ways than just one.