DOOM CAPTCHA: Are Video Games the Future of CAPTCHA?

Over the last few days, the IT community has been buzzing about DOOM CAPTCHA—a CAPTCHA that lets you play DOOM in your browser to prove you're human 🤖❌. Tons of posts have flooded social networks, especially LinkedIn and Reddit. The project’s GitHub repository quickly shot past 300 stars in a few hours. ⭐🚀

But is this just a fun side project, or is there more to it? Could DOOM CAPTCHA be the next big thing for online verification? Will we soon need to beat video games to prove we're not bots? 🎮

Read on to find out what’s behind the hype and whether the future of CAPTCHA involves fragging enemies instead of clicking on traffic lights! 🚦

What’s DOOM CAPTCHA?

As the name suggests, DOOM CAPTCHA is exactly what it sounds like—a CAPTCHA that asks you to play DOOM® to prove you're human. 🕹️

The idea is simple: You're presented with a fully playable DOOM instance running in your browser 🌐, and your task might be something like “Kill at least 3 monsters”. Successfully complete the mission, and you’ve proven your humanity 🧍‍♂️. Fail, and… well, better luck next time 😅.

You can test it yourself on the official demo site.

⚠️ Warning: DOOM is famously addictive 🔥, so be ready to lose track of time taking down enemies 🏆👾.

(DOOM® is built on the shareware version released for non-commercial use. It’s a registered trademark of id Software LLC, a ZeniMax Media company.)

Implementation Details for Nerds

DOOM CAPTCHA works its magic by harnessing Emscripten to compile a lean-and-mean port of Doom into WebAssembly (by Lorti), creating a bridge between the C-based game run loop (g_game.c) and a JavaScript-powered CAPTCHA UI. 🧠

Pretty amazing, right?

The original idea behind DOOM CAPTCHA first spawned from GitHub user vivirenremoto, who kicked things off back in 2021.

It all began with a minimal, SDL-based port of Doom, fine-tuned to run smoothly in your browser. But transforming it into a CAPTCHA-worthy adventure? That required some next-level customization 🔧.

Fast-forward to just a few days ago, and Guillermo Rauch dropped a fresh, optimized, and modernized take on DOOM CAPTCHA—bringing the concept back to life with more polish and wicked enhancements!

Extensions made for the CAPTCHA achievement:

• Modified the build to work with the shareware version of doom1.wad—keeping things legit.

  
  

• Introduced new process flags for smoother gameplay flow:

  • -nomenu (in m_menu.c) skips the menu screen and launches you straight into action.

  • -autoreborn (in p_mobj.c) automatically respawns players after a quick 2-second delay.

    
    

• Added custom JavaScript event-based callbacks:

  • onPlayerBorn fires when players are born or respawned.

  • onPlayerKilled triggers when a player bites the dust.

  • onEnemyKilled celebrates eliminating foes.

    
    

• For extra chaos, added default flags in d_main.c to crank up the challenge 😈:

  • -skill 5 = Nightmare mode

  • -fast = Even faster enemies

  • -warp e1m1 = Jump straight into the thick of it

  • -nomenu = No menu escape hatch

    
    

Ready to dive deeper? See the v0 UI generation or grab the source!

“Captchas Don't Have to be Boring”

That’s the motto behind the original DOOM CAPTCHA project from vivirenremoto, released in 2021.

Since then, CAPTCHAs have gotten way more complicated—and let’s be honest—more boring as AI makes automating them a breeze.

Most sites now feel more like government bureaucracy than fresh digital experiences. Continuously proving you’re human is tedious, frustrating, and downright stressful 😩. So, why not shake off that stress with a quick round of DOOM?

That’s what DOOM CAPTCHA is all about:

Instead of dragging puzzle pieces, clicking hydrants, or answering “Where are the traffic lights?” yet again, DOOM CAPTCHA gives you a far more satisfying challenge: control Doomguy, frag some monsters, and prove your humanity with style 💥.

Needless to say, the original project became a smash hit (see what I did there?), earning a thumbs-up from none other than John Carmack, co-creator of DOOM. It even landed at #3 on Product Hunt’s WTF Product of the Year award:

Guillermo Rauch’s modern, polished version took things even further—racking up GitHub stars like a madman:

Is DOOM CAPTCHA the Future of Fighting Bots?

TL;DR: Well, not really (at least not in this iteration)

Let’s find out!

A Project for Educational Purposes

As stated in both the original and the new versions of the project, don’t take DOOM CAPTCHA too seriously—that’s just a fun little project. If you know how to code, it’s pretty easy to break the security of this thing.

The project is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only, so you shouldn’t use it as a real anti-bot measure on your production sites.

Want to dive deeper into the latest challenges posed by advanced anti-bot technologies? Watch the video below:

Deep Reinforcement Learning Is an Issue

The relationship between AI and video games goes way back. One of the first AI projects that really made waves involved training a model to play Super Mario World using only raw pixels as input.

This was made possible by deep Q-learning and a Spatial Transformer network. 💡

If a project from 2016 could learn to play and solve the first level of Super Mario World, it’s hard to believe that today’s advanced AI models can’t easily handle something as simple as “kill at least 4 monsters” in DOOM. 🤖

AI-Based Aimbots: A Real Problem

Aimbot—ever heard of it? If you’ve played an online FPS game on PC or with cross-play, and seen someone destroy the competition with god-like accuracy, that’s Aimbot at work.

No surprise, one of the biggest applications of AI today is game cheating—improving performance through bots that automatically target and kill enemies.

And guess what? Many of these bots are open-source on GitHub, with dozens of collaborators and thousands of stars.

So yeah, while "killing monsters in DOOM" is fun, it’s definitely not bot-safe. 😅

How to Solve Any CAPTCHA

Sure, this DOOM CAPTCHA implementation might not be the future of anti-bots, but there's no doubt that "prove you're human" tests are going to need to get smarter. Yet, they’ll also need to be more engaging and interesting if they’re going to survive.

But here's the catch—new, modern CAPTCHAs could become a real problem, especially if you're building browser automation tools like a web scraping bot. Luckily, we've got you covered!

You can learn more about CAPTCHA bypass in these guides:

• How to Bypass CAPTCHAs With Playwright

• How to Bypass CAPTCHAs with Puppeteer

• How to Bypass CAPTCHAs With Selenium

• How to Bypass CAPTCHAs With Cypress

• How to Bypass CAPTCHAs With Python

  
  

If those tutorials don't do the trick, Bright Data has you covered with a CAPTCHA Solver service that integrates with any programming language and let you bypass challenges from the most popular providers!

Final Thoughts

DOOM—the game most of us all grew up with (or at least played once)—meets CAPTCHAs, the universally hated barrier we face as human users. Combine those two, and you get DOOM CAPTCHA, a wild project that could totally change the way we think about proving we're not bots.

No matter how CAPTCHAs evolve over the years, there's always a clever way to bypass them, and Bright Data has got and will always have your back. Join us in our mission to democratize the Web, keeping it accessible to everyone, everywhere, even for automated scripts.

Until next time, keep exploring the web freely— and without CAPTCHAs! 🌐