Captchas have been making me want to spoon my eyes out for years, so praise be to Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch who's just yeeted a Doom captcha into virtual existence (via Hackaday).
Since it was made open source, the 1992 shooter has been designated a veritable "can you run it" of potato hardware, finding its way onto teletext, volumetric displays, and even inside Doom itself (so you can gib while you gib).
So why nobody thought to make it a captcha until now boggles my mind, but I'm glad it's finally been done. We had a Doom-themed one before, but not one that was actually Doom.
- Galaxy-brained high schooler ports Doom to a PDF file, paving the way for a bloody revolution in invoicing
- A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google
The Doom captcha is a WebAssembly app, which runs low-level code in-browser, and it runs mighty fine based on my testing.
Testing which may or may not have confirmed I'm an awful gamer, as I failed over and over again to kill the three enemies required to "prove I'm human". I guess all those calling me a bot in Counter-Strike had a point.
It's a traditional arrows-and-spacebar affair, too. So be prepared to hearken back to CRT-era muscle memory—if such memory still sits in your brain bank—if you want to see those pixels spatter. Oh, and if you want to prove you're a human being.
The only question is whether and where this captcha will be used. I'd personally like to see donned on some very serious, official-looking websites. Government ones, perhaps? There's so much that could be done. "Rip and tear into the online portal", etc. etc. Hop on it, webdevs.
