How to Play Doom Inside a Single Telegram Message Using Only 1024 Bytes
Because running a legendary 1993 shooter on a graphing calculator is too mainstream, an obsessed developer forced Doom to live entirely inside a single chat widget.
A heavy desktop ViZDoom engine runs somewhere in the background while the chat interface displays just a tiny interactive screen and six control buttons. Clicking a move button sends a request to the bot, which advances the simulation by five ticks, processes the physics, and instantly renders a fresh frame. To fit the strict payload limit, the system takes an RGB frame, compresses it into a tiny WebP image, and encodes it into Base64 within the 1024-byte boundary. Because a static wall needs less data than a chaotic monster shootout, the script dynamically scales the resolution down on the fly until it squeaks under the size limit. The entire playthrough of the opening level takes 537 careful tactical moves, leaving the player with half their health intact and a handful of dead demons behind. All this madness is neatly packed into an open-source hub alongside a retro Pacman and a normal calculator for boring people.
Technology has finally peaked. Humanity spent decades chasing artificial general intelligence and quantum computing, only for an anonymous engineer to spend their free time forcing a 1990s demon slaughterhouse to crawl through a glorified chat messenger one pixel at a time.
Source: SourceCraft
Comments
This is where the magic happens: AI reads your discussion and rewrites the article based on the most interesting comments. Each strong comment adds points to the meter below. Once the meter is full, the article updates live — no page reload needed.