Step aside, Doom: Mad lad plays Minecraft using a receipt printer for reasons known only to him and God

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Beyond creative mode.

Minecraft Java Edition still
(Image credit: Mojang)

I'm sure we all get that sudden, seemingly random urge to boot up Minecraft every now and then. And like any game as intensely moddable as the venerable voxel sandbox, each revisit is bound to become further divorced from the intended experience than the last. But here's something really different: as if to explore the frontier of unintended ways to play Minecraft, YouTuber smillgames has elected to play it on a printer. The sort used in restaurants. Eyup.

Unlike the numerous attempts to play Doom on increasingly basic technology—a vape, or itself, for instance—this isn't about getting the game itself to run on the device. In smillgames' scenario, a different device is running Minecraft as normal. The receipt printer is merely used as a monitor of sorts, as he shared in a post on X.

There is precedent for this; I think smill is getting the same sort of FPS I was getting on Oblivion back in the day. But all the excess ink and paper, that's new! And hey, it might not be an ideal way to play Minecraft, but it certainly makes for a spectacle. When a commenter on X remarked he could have left fewer gaps of unused negative space on the receipt papers, smill replied "I would've but I just love deforestation."

Not all of it went in the bin (or wherever it ended up), though. Smill shared a trophy of his playthrough soon after: a framed series of screenshots showing the moment he "beat Minecraft" using the printer as his display.

It's a zany little stunt, but I'm starting to feel like we're running out of weird things to play videogames on, and that makes me a little sad. I'd like to see one of these bizarre challenge playthroughs truly shock me again. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever feel the high of learning someone played Overwatch using a bunch of bananas again.

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Justin Wagner
Justin Wagner

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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