What is this? Doom for ants?

Doom Brick

YouTuber and Weta Workshop graphics engineer James Brown has turned a tiny Lego brick into a device that can play the 1993 hit video game "Doom."

It's an impressive escalation — and miniaturization — longstanding trend: we've already seen "Doom" being played on a candy bar, a John Deer tractor — and even within "Doom" itself.

Tilt to Win

The controls of Brown's "Doom" Lego brick are more intuitive than you might think. The engineer added a small accelerometer to his minuscule computer system, allowing him to move around inside the game by simply tilting it.

"I hooked up the accelerometer, so Doom is now 'playable' entirely on the brick," Brown told Hackster. "The capacitive touch wasn't tuned very well, so it's a bit shooty."

Neatly tucked inside, the tiny brick features an even tinier microcontroller, a Raspberry Pi RP2040, and a barely visible 0.42-inch OLED single-color panel.

Brown even managed to squeeze touch-sensitive buttons and a battery pack into the brick.

The tinkerer also managed to stuff all of these components into a simple ring earlier this year, just in time for Valentine's Day.

It's a playful demonstration of just how tiny and accessible off-the-shelf computer components have become — but at the same time, most gamers probably wouldn't want to spend hours staring at a half-an-inch across screen.

READ MORE: Your Lego Minifigures Can Play Doom by Moving This Motion-Sensing Lego Computer Brick Around [Gizmodo]

More on Doom: Rejoice, Gamers! You Can Now Run DOOM Inside DOOM


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