Rats Are Playing Doom Now and Honestly It Checks Out

We have been engaged in the sacred, eternal ritual known as "Can it run Doom?" for decades. We've forced Doom onto ATMs, pregnancy tests, calculators, VCRs, printing calculators from the 80s, you name it - if it had silicon and a will to live, someone found a way to compile Doom onto it. Doom is the Monty Python of software: indestructible, inexplicable, and laughing while it destroys everything it touches.

But now - oh now - the game has evolved. We've graduated from run to play. And yes. The first contestants aren't robots. They're rats. Actual rodents. With tiny curved AMOLED screens strapped to their faces and a real shoot button. Doom has been, in a sense, rodentified.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge are teaching rats to play Doom. Not perfectly. Not gracefully. But they can do the thing. They navigate a simple Doom-like world using a control interface in exchange for a treat. The rats aren't fragging demons at Quake speeds, but give them credit - even getting a creature whose natural instinct is "run away from everything" to engage with a shooter game is a revelation.

This isn't just meme fodder (though the memes are already writing themselves). It's a genuinely fascinating blend of behavioral science, neuroscience, and cumulative "why the hell not" energy that defines human curiosity. We went from "can we run Doom on a toaster?" to "can we teach living creatures to interact with an FPS environment?" That progression is both terrifying and somehow comforting.

So yes, rats can play a version of Doom. Kind of. They aren't speedrunning yet. They aren't camping spawn points. But they are learning to manipulate an avatar in a hostile environment for rewards. Just like us on our jobs.

In the grand chronology of Doom experiments, this does not disappoint. Next up: squirrels? Cockroaches? Your houseplant equipped with tiny VR goggles? Doom is our Rosetta Stone, our philosophical test of whether existence itself can be reduced to 1993 sprite engines.

And the answer keeps coming back: yes. Yes it can.