Doom being crammed into places games have no business running is barely news at this point. Lawn mowers, printers, chatbots, even gut bacteria have all run this 1993 shooter classic. But this time the host is something that's shipped with Windows for over three decades: MS Paint.
According to Tom's Hardware, a project called DoomPaint gets the original shareware version of Doom actually running inside MS Paint, hitting 35FPS — not bad at all for a 1990s PC game. What makes this more notable is who's behind it: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich. He laid out the mechanics on the project's GitHub page — every frame gets copied to the Windows clipboard first, then pasted onto MS Paint's canvas, functioning as a legitimate document-editing action each time.
In other words, MS Paint has no idea it's "playing a game." It's simply receiving a constant stream of paste commands, and every color shift on the canvas registers to the system as a manual paste by the user. The GitHub repo comes with full resources and setup instructions, so anyone curious can get the game running in their own copy of Paint. The build even keeps sound effects and music intact — this isn't just a silent visual demo.
Doom's engine has always been famous for being lightweight and efficient, which is exactly why it keeps getting shoehorned into every unconventional platform imaginable for over thirty years. DoomPaint just adds one more entry to that already absurd list. But what's arguably more interesting than the technical details is that this time the person behind the wheel isn't some hobbyist hacker — it's the executive in charge of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.
