A high school student just made Doom playable in a PDF file

There’s a growing trend of developers flexing their muscles to make PDF documents do completely different things than what they’re intended to do. The goal is to push the boundaries of the PDF format.

PDF (which stands for Portable Document Format) was created in 1992 as a way to present documents independently of software, hardware, and operating systems. It’s practical, but it’s also complex — and that’s what makes the format attractive to programmers and malware creators alike. (Where some see security risks, others see a chance to shine.)

As it turns out, one GitHub user named ading2210 — a “high school student with an interest in programming, web development, and cybersecurity” — has pushed the envelope even further with DoomPDF, a port of Doom that runs directly in a PDF file. The only catch is that it needs a PDF reader that supports JavaScript, which is usually only available in Adobe Acrobat and browsers like Chromium.

You can try playing DoomPDF yourself here (PDF). The developer was inspired by PDFtris, a PDF version of Tetris created by Thomas Rinsma.