Just when you thought you had seen every possible Doom mod, two game developers released a free browser game that reimagines the first level of 1993’s Doom as an art gallery, replacing demons with paintings and shotguns with wine glasses.
Doom: The Gallery Experience, created by Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, transforms the iconic E1M1 level into a virtual museum space where players guide a glasses-wearing Doomguy through halls of fine art as classical music plays in the background. The game links each displayed artwork to its corresponding page on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website.
“In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres,” write the developers on the game’s itch.io page, “in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).”
In the game, players gather money scattered throughout the gallery to purchase items from the gift shop. It also includes a “cheese meter” that fills up as players consume hors d’oeuvres found in the environment, collected as if they were health packs in the original game.
It’s a WebAssembly application, but it was made via a human language, prompt-driven web development tool called v0 that’s part of a suite of features offered as part of Vercel, a cloud-based developer tool service, of which Rauch is the CEO. You can see the LLM bot chat history with the series of prompts that produced this CAPTCHA game on the v0 website.
Strangely enough, there has been a past attempt at making a Doom CAPTCHA. In 2021, developer Miquel Camps Orteza made an approximation of one—though not all the assets matched Doom, and it was more Doom-adjacent. That one was made directly by hand, and its source code is available on GitHub. Its developer noted that it’s not secure; it’s just for fun.
Rauch’s attempt is no more serious as a CAPTCHA, but it at least resembles Doom more closely.
Don’t expect to be playing this to verify at real websites anytime soon, though. It’s not secure, and its legality is fuzzy at best. While the code for Doom is open source, the assets from the game like enemy sprites and environment textures—which feature prominently in this application—are not.
In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. Intrigued by the game, we tracked down its author, Andy Gryc, and probed into the title’s mysterious undersea origins.
“If you ask my family, they’ll confirm that I’ve been obsessed with squid for a long time,” Gryc told Ars Technica. “It’s admittedly very goofy—and that’s my fault—although I was inspired by Doom, which had come out relatively recently.”
In Lair of Squid, you’re trapped in an underwater labyrinth, seeking a way out while avoiding squid roaming the corridors. A collision with any cephalopod results in death. To progress through each stage and ascend to the surface, you locate the exit and provide a hidden, scrambled code word. The password is initially displayed as asterisks, with letters revealed as you encounter them within the maze.
Buckle up for a tale of rogue coding, cephalopod obsession, and the most unexpected Easter egg in palmtop history. This is no fish story—it’s the saga of Lair of Squid.
A computer in the palm of your hand
Introduced in 1994, the HP 200LX palmtop PC put desktop functionality in a pocket-size package. With a small QWERTY keyboard, MS-DOS compatibility, and a suite of productivity apps, the clamshell 200LX offered a vision of one potential future of mobile computing. It featured a 7.91 MHz 80186 CPU, a monochrome 640×200 CGA display, and 1–4 megabytes of RAM.
I’ve collected vintage computers since 1993, and people frequently offer to send me old devices they’d rather not throw away. Recently, a former HP engineer sent me his small but nice collection of ’90s HP handheld palmtop computers, including a 95LX (1991), 100LX (1993), and 200LX.
HP designed its portable LX series to run many MS-DOS programs that feature text mode or CGA graphics, and each includes built-in versions of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, a word processor, terminal program, calculator, and more.
I owned a 95LX as a kid (a hand-me-down from my dad’s friend), which came with a simplistic overhead maze game called TigerFox. So imagine my surprise in 2024, when trawling through the productivity and personal organization apps on that 200LX, to find a richly detailed first-person maze game based around cephalopods, of all things.
(I was less surprised to find an excellent built-in Minesweeper clone, Hearts and Bones, which is definitely a more natural fit for the power and form of the 200LX itself.)
Lair of Squid isn’t a true Doom clone since it’s not a first-person shooter (in some ways, it’s more like a first-person Pac-Man without pellets), but its mere existence—on a black-and-white device best suited for storing phone numbers and text notes—deserves note as one of the weirdest and most interesting pack-in games to ever exist.
Just after discovering Lair of Squid on my device earlier this year, I tweeted about it, and I extracted the file for the game (called “maze.exe”) from the internal ROM drive and sent it to DOS gaming historian Anatoly Shashkin, who put the game on The Internet Archive so anyone can play it in their browser.
After that, I realized that I wanted to figure out who wrote this quirky game, and thanks to a post on RGB Classic Games, I found a name: Andy Gryc. With some luck in cold-emailing, I found him.
John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.
In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. “When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours,” Romero told Ars in a recent interview. “They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing.”
Despite Catacomb 3-D‘s technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn’t feel right.
“Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I’m just like, ‘Guys we need to not make this game [Keen],'” he said. “‘This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.’ … And everyone was immediately was like, ‘Yeah, you know, you’re right. That is the new thing, and we haven’t seen it, and we can do it, so why aren’t we doing it?'”
The team started working on Wolfenstein 3D that very night, Romero said. And the rest is history.
Going for speed
What set Catacomb 3-D and its successors apart from other first-person gaming experiments of the time, Romero said, “was our speed—the speed of the game was critical to us having that massive differentiation. Everyone else was trying to do a world that was proper 3D—six degrees of freedom or representation that was really detailed. And for us, the way that we were going to go was a simple rendering at a high speed with good gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck with them, and that’s what really differentiated them from everyone else.”
That focus on speed extended to id’s development process, which Romero said was unrecognizable compared to even low-budget indie games of today. The team didn’t bother writing out design documents laying out crucial ideas beforehand, for instance, because Romero said “the design doc was next to us; it was the creative director… The games weren’t that big back then, so it was easy for us to say, ‘this is what we’re making’ and ‘things are going to be like this.’ And then we all just work on our own thing.”
The early id designers didn’t even use basic development tools like version control systems, Romero said. Instead, development was highly compartmentalized between different developers; “the files that I’m going to work on, he doesn’t touch, and I don’t touch his files,” Romero remembered of programming games alongside John Carmack. “I only put the files on my transfer floppy disk that he needs, and it’s OK for him to copy everything off of there and overwrite what he has because it’s only my files, and vice versa. If for some reason the hard drive crashed, we could rebuild the source from anyone’s copies of what they’ve got.”