Doom Finally Playable on Printers to Prove Point About Hacking

Outside Tetris, Doom might be the most ported video game in history. The seminal 1993 shooter is available on PC, Super Nintendo, Sega 32X, PlayStation, Saturn, Game Boy Advance, Jaguar, Xbox 360, graphing calculators, other video games…What else could Doom possibly be ported to?

A wireless printer, as it turns out. According to BBC, security researcher Michael Jordon managed to hack a Canon Pixma printer to run Doom. It took four months of research for this project to come to fruition.

Less about games, more about hacking

Yet Jordan did not undertake this project because he is a noted Doom fan. Far from it; he wants nothing to do with the game after this. Instead, Jordan chose to port Doom to a printer as a sort of call to action.

According to him, it’s a demonstration of a very serious security loophole in these printers. (This should not be surprising. In fact, he first shared this story at 44Con, a hacker conference in the United Kingdom.)

By bringing Doom to printers, Jordan has demonstrated a route that hackers could use to access people’s printers and tamper with their software. Canon has responded to this by updating printer security measures for both present and future printers.