Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

Milton Bradley's tabletop all-in-one console, Vectrex, can now be inked in as another platform that can "run" seminal 1993 release DOOM. New footage surfaced yesterday that showed the granddaddy of the shooter genre "running" on the long-obsolete vector-based system.

Even given the Vectrex display's rudimentary visuals, id Software's legendary FPS title is instantly recognisable, with its sci-fi futurist depiction of Hell on Earth beautifully transformed into smooth vector visuals. Vectrex DOOM is at once delightful and creepy, and depicts a future of gaming that might've happened, had the vector stylings of titles such as Tempest (1981), Star Wars (1983), and Battlezone (1980) become an industry norm.

Now, of course, DOOM isn't actually running on Vectrex here. This video is the work of modder Jason Kopp (ArcadeJason), who built the demo using the UVMC2 (Ultimate Vectrex Multicart 2). The cart essentially works as a mini plug-in PC, doing all the grunt work while using the Vectrex monitor to display its output, with audio outsourced via a 3.5mm jack. The build of DOOM itself is built on an SDK designed by another modder, Daniel Ferrer Guerrero.

As such, DOOM is not "running on Vectrex" as much as it is "running on a PC and displayed on a Vectrex"

But that's neither here nor there. We don't run DOOM on an oscilloscope, a Texas Instruments calculator, a Dreamcast VMU, or a home pregnancy test because we can. We run DOOM on these devices because we should. It's exactly as Bruce Springsteen said: Baby, we were born to DOOM, and we won't evolve as a species until every working display on Earth's face has been adapted to Rip and Tear.