DOOM Runs Inside Microsoft Paint With DoomPaint, a New GitHub Project
Arkadiy Andrienko
Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO, released DoomPaint on August 2 as a GitHub experiment with a very literal punchline: Paint is just the display layer, while the game runs elsewhere. The project is available on GitHub, and the joke is simple: Paint is only the display layer, while the real game runs separately.
DoomPaint does not recreate the shooter inside the drawing app. Instead, it runs the actual DOOM engine and pastes each rendered frame into Paint's canvas as a normal document edit, with every frame first passing through the Windows clipboard. Russinovich summed up the idea plainly:
Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke.
The project uses the original shareware DOOM1.WAD and also includes Freedoom assets. Sound and music are included too, so the result is not just a visual trick but a working version of the classic shooter in an unexpected window.
DoomPaint can reach up to DOOM's native 35 Hz when running at the game's original 320×200 resolution. It also treats undo like time travel: every frame is an undo step, so pressing Ctrl+Z can rewind the latest action, while saving from Paint produces a PNG screenshot of the current frame.
The source code for DoomPaint is already on GitHub, so anyone curious about this odd experiment can inspect how it works for themselves. It is a strange but very literal answer to a simple idea: what happens when DOOM is made playable in Microsoft Paint?
