An MIT researcher has gotten the 30-year-old computer game Doom running on actual gut bacteria. The frame rate is really bad, as the game would take nearly 600 years to beat.

An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.

Specifically, Ramlan created a display inside of a cell wall made entirely of E. coli bacteria. The 32x48 1-bit display may not win any resolution awards, but who cares, right? It’s Doom running on bacteria. The researcher dosed the bacteria with fluorescent proteins to get them to light up just like digital pixels.

  • Dirk Darkly
    8•5 months ago

    Did you just equate turning living organisms into a monitor with arranging rocks?

    • @heavyEnglish
      2•5 months ago

      Living organisms into a monitor… In the same way that a bunch of people in a stadium can hold up squares that make up an image? I mean at the end of the day almost anything can be made into a “monitor”. That doesn’t mean it’s “running DOOM”.

      • @[email protected]
        3•5 months ago

        Yeah it’s more like displaying a picture of the doom intro screen rather than actually computing it. Still cool but vastly different than computing the drawing functionality of the game.