Captchas have been making me want to gouge my eyes out for years, so kudos to the CEO of Vercel Guillermo Rauch who just met Doom captcha into virtual existence (via Hackaday).
Since the 1992 shooter was released as open source, it’s been embraced as real potato hardware, where you can run it, hitting teletext, volumetric displays, and even Doom himself (so you can giggle while gibberish).
Why no one has thought to make it a captcha until now is something that puzzles me, but I’m glad it’s finally done. We had the Holocaust-thematic one before, but not one that was actually Doom.
Doom captcha is a WebAssembly application that runs low-level code in the browser and works very well, according to my tests.
Tests that may or may not have confirmed that I was a terrible player, as I repeatedly failed to kill the three enemies required to “prove I’m human.” I guess everyone who called me a Counter-Strike bot was right.
It’s also a classic arrow and spacebar thing. So get ready to revert to your CRT-era muscle memory – if that’s still in your brain bank – if you want to see pixel splatter. Oh, and if you want to prove you’re human.
The only question is whether and where this captcha will be used. Personally, I would like to see such people on very grave, official-looking websites. Maybe government? There is so much that can be done. “Rip and tear web portal” etc. etc. Jump on it, web developers.
