Play Doom inside a bank ledger? Dev builds FPS entirely in COBOL

A developer named icitry decided to push the absolute limits of sanity by creating FPS.cob, a 2.5D first-person shooter built from scratch in the 1959 business programming language. Since COBOL was designed to process bank transactions rather than run-and-gun actions, the project relies entirely on raw raycasting math to render a pseudo-3D world.

The developer quickly ran into a massive wall because the language completely lacks a graphics engine, UI frameworks, or basic pixel-manipulation tools. To bypass this, the game outputs every single frame as a raw bitmap image directly into the standard output stream. The input tracking is handled in an equally chaotic way, forcing command-line keyboard reads to behave like a responsive controller.

This is not the first time a programmer has abused the ancient banking language for gaming. Developer Fabian Meyer previously launched CobolCraft, which is a fully functional Minecraft multiplayer server written in COBOL that runs inside Linux or a Docker container.

Using sixty-year-old administrative tools to render pseudo-3D graphics is the ultimate form of digital rebellion. While modern game engines require gigabytes of bloated libraries, true legends apparently prefer writing bank-reconciliation code to shoot imaginary monsters. It is only a matter of time before someone runs a crypto exchange on a grandfather clock.

Source: GitHub