Doom can ‘run’ on a DNS database now, and one of the technology’s pioneers says ‘I can’t decide whether this is deliciously horrible, or else horribly delicious’
The ongoing trend of running Doom on unconventional systems has reached a new milestone: a DNS database. DNS (domain name system), the infrastructure responsible for translating web URLs into IP addresses, has now become the computing substrate for running the classic 1993 game.
This latest implementation, created by Corey Quinn from The Register, represents a significant technical escalation from previous Doom ports to unusual hardware. While Doom has previously been stored as DNS text records, this version actually executes the game within DNS itself. Specifically, Quinn compiled Doom for a “32-bit machine whose arithmetic and memory live in DNS”—meaning the game’s computational operations run through DNS queries and data.
This builds on a humorous trend spanning two decades. Originally, the question was whether high-end systems could run Crysis. More recently, the challenge has inverted: demonstrating that Doom can run on virtually any technology with minimal computational capacity. Previous examples have included vapes, motherboard BIOS systems, and pregnancy tests. Each feat highlights both the game’s legendary portability and the creative problem-solving of enthusiasts.
Quinn’s DNS implementation is particularly notable for not merely storing Doom files in DNS records—a technically straightforward task—but rather using DNS as the actual execution environment. This requires repurposing infrastructure designed for network address resolution into a general-purpose computing platform, albeit an extremely limited one.