We all remember seeing Doom played on calculators and even a fridge door, but who would have thought we’d hear about someone firing up the game above Earth’s atmosphere. This experiment, which sounds like a Reddit post turned real, was part of ESA’s hacking challenge for the now-decommissioned OPS-SAT satellite, a small “flying laboratory” used for testing software and mission control systems in orbit.
Doom finally leaves Earth
As reported by ZDNet, Ólafur Waage worked with ESA engineer Georges Labrèche to pull off what is probably the most expensive Doom port ever made. “It was as much a work of his as it was mine and the whole ESA team,” Waage said at the Ubuntu Summit, where he presented the project.
OPS-SAT might be small, just 10 x 10 x 30 cm, but its onboard flight computer is “10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft,” according to The Register. That made it a perfect testbed for experimental code, including running an old-school shooter like Doom.
The idea wasn’t to play Doom in real-time, of course. The satellite doesn’t have a screen or a joystick. Instead, the developers uploaded a scripted demo, a pre-recorded gameplay sequence showing the player running, shooting, and collecting items, and then made the satellite output game data back to mission control.
But a text log saying “you ran Doom” wasn’t enough for them. They wanted an actual screenshot.
Making Doom visible from orbit
Here’s where it gets clever. OPS-SAT doesn’t have a graphics card. But it does have a camera pointed at Earth. So, Waage’s team used that camera to simulate in-game visuals. Using a bit of orbital coding magic, they tweaked the software to combine Doom’s low-resolution visuals with actual images of Earth from space.
That meant every time the game showed the sky, it wasn’t just any sky; it was a live photo of the planet below. “A text output saying you ran Doom is nice, but it’s not nice enough,” Waage joked. “What we wanted was a screenshot of the satellite playing Doom.”
According to Tom’s Hardware, the team first attempted to use Chocolate Doom, a faithful source port of the original, but it failed to generate visuals since the satellite couldn’t render graphics. They later switched to doomgeneric, a version made for easy porting, and then re-routed the output to a virtual display.
They even used an onboard AI model to resize and compress Earth images so they’d fit the 8-bit color palette of 1993’s Doom. The end result looked surprisingly authentic, a hellish landscape with Earth shining brightly in the sky.
A small game, a giant leap for geeks
The OPS-SAT experiment wasn’t just a random stunt. It was part of ESA’s broader goal to test software resilience, machine learning, and communication systems in orbit. According to Tom’s Hardware, the same satellite also hosted the first AI model trained in orbit, the first stock trade from space, and even a game of chess.
Still, running Doom in space feels special, partly because of what the game means to so many of us who grew up playing it. Waage and his team proved that even in an environment as strict as spaceflight, there’s room for a bit of playful creativity.
To think that somewhere above Earth, even for a brief moment, a tiny satellite was busy fighting demons on Mars is oddly poetic.
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