ASCII DOOM

Someone said: let's take DOOM and turn it into a roguelike with ASCII graphics. And they really mean everything — instead of 3D sprites you see walls made of hashtags, an enemy is represented by a single letter, and you shoot with dashes. This game knows what you can't afford.

It's a surprisingly functional conversion of the cult shooter into the world of pure text. You navigate a labyrinth of real estate made of ASCII characters, collect weapons and ammo, kill demons. The logic is pretty much the same as the original — you go through a level, avoid or neutralize all enemies, find the exit. Except instead of explosive graphics you get something that could run over teletext.

Playing is fine — you click on tiles or tap on the keyboard. Movement is slow, tactical, sometimes downright boring compared to the dynamics of the original. There's no pace, that baked feeling of DOOM where you run in panic around corners. Instead you calculate everything, you see everything. Half a level fits on the screen, so you're blind and have to work your way through by feeling around. You die quickly if you're not careful — and that's actually the only tension the game offers.

ASCII DOOM from 1999 is primarily an attempt at how the legends of the new medium work without their hardware. A historical curiosity, proof that DOOM can be packed into four KB of text. For your own entertainment, nostalgia will gradually push you in here, not design.

You play it in a browser as a web archive, you imagine the graphics yourself and waiting between turns forces you to think. It's not cool, but it's honest — a game without ego that knows exactly what it can do in text mode. If you're curious about how it actually was before FPS returned to the heart of culture, here's the answer.