Thanks to Doom, I can finally solve captcha prompts without wanting to spoon my eyeballs out and wander into the wilderness

Doom Captcha on a colourful orange and yellow background

(Image credit: Vercel)

Captchas have been making me want to spoon my eyes out for years, so praise be to Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch who's just yeeted a Doom captcha into virtual existence (via Hackaday).

Since it was made open source, the 1992 shooter has been designated a veritable "can you run it" of potato hardware, finding its way onto teletext, volumetric displays, and even inside Doom itself (so you can gib while you gib).

It's a traditional arrows-and-spacebar affair, too. So be prepared to hearken back to CRT-era muscle memory—if such memory still sits in your brain bank—if you want to see those pixels spatter. Oh, and if you want to prove you're a human being.

Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob's led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world's #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It's definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.