A high school student found a way to run the classic PC game Doom from within a PDF file by leveraging the format's support for JavaScript and the Chromium browser engine.

The iconic 1993 game Doom, known for being the world's most ported game, has found its way into a PDF document.

In the past, hackers have used this little-known Adobe feature to code simple games like Breakout and Tetris into PDF documents. But ading220 went further, recompiling a streamlined fork of Doom 's open source code using an old version of Emscripten that outputs optimized asm.js code.

There is a race to see who can bend the PDF file format to do the most impressive thing. Considering the more-than-30-year-old shooter, Doom, has been ported to many unexpected places, it was inevitable it would turn up in a PDF file.

Thomas Rinsma, a security analyst and hobbyist tinkerer, recently figured out how to create a version of Tetris that runs inside a PDF file. According to a personal website post subsequently highlighted by BoingBoing on January 15th,

However, modern browsers can unlock more features for PDF documents, as proven by new ports of Tetris and DOOM. Thomas Rinsma, a security analysist and developer, published a working demonstration of the classic puzzle game Tetris running entirely in a PDF.