From the Department of Too Much Free Time

Someone has created a version of the seminal video game Doom that is contained in a PDF file.

It's monochrome, but apparently, it works.

Still, why? 

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.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed to present documents in a manner that was independent of the software, hardware, and operating system showing them. It's an undoubtedly neat system, but malware authors have been known to exploit its complexity.

However, what for one person is an opportunity for mischief is for another a demonstration of programming prowess, which brings us to DoomPDF, a port of the classic first-person-shooter that will run from a PDF, assuming the PDF engine used to display the document at least partially supports PDF file format's implementation of Javascript.

The Reg ran the PDF in a Chromium browser and, purely in the interest of research, spent perhaps more time than we should making sure the monochrome rendering of '90s mayhem worked as we remembered.

 This appears to be done with overgrown dynamic ASCII art.

But again, why?