Poom is a pixelated 1980s version of Doom you can play right now

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Can't wait for the Poom clones.

Shooting a shotgun in Poom
(Image credit: Frederic Souchu and Paranoid Cactus)

The Pico-8 is a virtual machine and game engine dreamed up as a way of emulating the design limitations of the 1980s, a fantasy videogame console that never existed but which anyone can create games for today. Celeste, for instance, began life as a Pico-8 game, and there's a Pico-8 version of Wolfenstein 3D. And now, in the grand tradition of porting Doom to literally everything, here's Poom, a Pico-8 version of Doom.

You can play Poom right now in your browser, using the arrow keys to move and either X or spacebar to shoot, with Z to strafe or open doors. (It also supports mouse, and other control schemes are available.) There are six original levels and they all nail the feeling of original Doom. So does the music, which is chiptune covers of the original soundtrack. It's the work of Frederic Souchu and Paranoid Cactus, and it's rad as hell.

Thanks for the heads-up, PCGamesN.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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