Every person who has spent a certain amount of time online knows Captchas - anddetests her from the bottom of her heart. Captcha is the abbreviation for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” and is intended to distinguish humans from bots.
You have to click on outrageously blurry or pixelated images with certain objects on them (such as bicycles) and are usually stuck when asked whether you should also choose that one tile on which ten percent of the rear wheel can still be seen.
Now there is a new variant that makes all previous ones look like a completely banal elementary school test: The Doom Captcha!
»Kill at least three monsters«
The developer and tech CEO Guillermo Rauch replaces the hidden object question with a playable nightmare level from the shooter classic, in which we have to kill three monsters to pass the captcha. And that is easier said than done! Don't you think so? Well then, let's go:
Here you canTry the captcha yourself in the broser.
The running joke that Doom runs out of pretty much everything has been around for years. But a functioning captcha is definitely new territory. Here is an (extremely incomplete) history of Doom ports in the recent past:
2017:
2020:
2023:
2024:
By the way: There is an astonishing amount of highly complex lore hidden in Doom, which we will examine in more detail here:
Nostalgie dank Captcha
We only solved the Doom captcha ourselves after several attempts because the thing is just incredibly difficult, to say the least.
Thanks to the nightmare difficulty level, the Doom Marine bites the dust faster than we can say "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart" and since there is no strafing (i.e. running sideways), dodging is pretty tricky.
After all: the classic control with arrow keys brings back fond memories of the good old shooter days of the 90s. Who would have thought: A Captcha test that triggers gaming nostalgia!
The only question that remains now is whether any website operators are crazy enough to actually use this captcha. If so, there will definitely be more frustration than with the stupid bicycle pictures.
