A high school student found a way to run the classic PC game Doom from within a PDF file by leveraging the format's support for JavaScript and the Chromium browser engine.

There’s a growing trend of developers flexing their muscles to make PDF documents do completely different things than what they’re intended to do. The goal is to push the boundaries of the PDF format.

In the past, hackers have used this little-known Adobe feature to code simple games like Breakout and Tetris into PDF documents. But ading220 went further, recompiling a streamlined fork of Doom 's open source code using an old version of Emscripten that outputs optimized asm.js code.

The feat has been shown off by creator ading.dev on Bluesky, where they reveal that it works because PDFs support Javascript, thus allowing them to use Emscripten to turn Doom into a asm.js file and thus run the game within the PDF engine.

Thomas Rinsma, a security analyst and hobbyist tinkerer, recently figured out how to create a version of Tetris that runs inside a PDF file. According to a personal website post subsequently highlighted by BoingBoing on January 15th,

However, modern browsers can unlock more features for PDF documents, as proven by new ports of Tetris and DOOM. Thomas Rinsma, a security analysist and developer, published a working demonstration of the classic puzzle game Tetris running entirely in a PDF.