Doom Just Found Its Weirdest New Home: Microsoft Paint

DoomPaint is the latest in the series of unusual Doom ports, from Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Microsoft Azure. Russinovich whipped DoomPaint up in his spare time with the help of Claude Opus 4.8, based on information in his LinkedIn posts and the code itself.

DoomPaint is about what you'd expect from a wild port like this, because apps like Microsoft Paint can't accommodate an entire game engine inside of its interface. What's really happening is that Doom is being rendered in the background through ViZDoom, and each rendered frame is placed into the Windows clipboard and then immediately pasted into MS Paint.

The visual results, combined with keyboard controls from within the Microsoft Paint app, allows DoomPaint to simulate the game as if it were being run inside an MS Paint container, as screenshotted below. The real engine is still doing all the heavy lifting, and Paint is quickly presenting new frames.


Just last month, we covered a playable Doom port for the Commodore 64, that required a custom game engine to get working. There's even been DoomPDF and a project allowing lab-grown human brain cells to play Doom. Of existing releases, DoomPaint is most like DoomPDF, which uses its target "platform" as visual output for a real Doom port running in the background.

This may be the first Doom port where AI-assistance took center stage, though. With Doom considered an American cultural landmark, Mark Russinovich's DoomPaint may mark a new era for these port projects, where AI helps enthusiasts find even sillier places to put Doom.