Someone made a CAPTCHA where you play Doom on Nightmare difficulty – Ars Technica
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) this is not the first Doom CAPTCHA.
People have been complaining for a while that passing a CAPTCHA is too difficult, but developer and tech CEO Guillermo Rauch has made one of the hardest yet: a fully playable CAPTCHA based on the classic PC game Doom.It’s been a long-running joke that developers will make Doom run on absolutely anything, so it’s not much of a surprise that it’s now running inside something that resembles a CAPTCHA.The app essentially amounts to a small Doom level that is playable with keyboard controls (arrow keys to move, space bar to shoot) within a CAPTCHA-like presentation. You must kill three enemies to pass the test.The level reflects Doom’s Nightmare difficulty, and it is much harder than needed to be an effective CAPTCHA—especially since you can’t strafe to avoid enemy fire. It took me several tries to cheese a victory, and the Hacker News thread about this app is filled with people noting how difficult it is and sharing strategies.It’s a WebAssembly application, but it was made via a human language, prompt-driven web development tool called v0 that’s part of a suite of features offered as part of Vercel, a cloud-based developer tool service, of which Rauch is the CEO. You can see the LLM bot chat history with the series of prompts that produced this CAPTCHA game on the v0 website.Strangely enough, there has been a past attempt at making a Doom CAPTCHA. In 2021, developer Miquel Camps Orteza made an approximation of one—though not all the assets matched Doom, and it was more Doom-adjacent. That one was made directly by hand, and its source code is available on GitHub. Its developer noted that it’s not secure; it’s just for fun.Rauch’s attempt is no more serious as a CAPTCHA, but it at least resembles Doom more closely.Don’t expect to be playing this to verify at real websites anytime soon, though. It’s not secure, and its legality is fuzzy at best. While the code for Doom is open source, the assets from the game like enemy sprites and environment textures—which feature prominently in this application—are not.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of
technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts
and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After
all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s important.
