Doom-Themed CAPTCHA: A New Frontier in Human Verification and Gaming Nostalgia

CAPTCHAs now run Doom - on nightmare mode

Though the same couldn't be said for most of us mere mortals, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch had a productive festive period, resulting in a CAPTCHA that requires the user to kill three monsters in Doom - on nightmare mode. The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart is a challenge-response authentication scheme that presents people with a puzzle or question that a computer supposedly cannot solve. This started in 1997 as a series of distorted letters and numbers, later evolving into image verification requests, then a more background process to identify low-risk human users under Google's reCAPTCHA implementation. The technology is typically used to protect websites from being flooded with bot traffic. However, as demonstrated in a 2023 study, CAPTCHA's days are numbered as an effective bot defense because bots written for the purpose of beating CAPTCHAs can do it much quicker and more accurately than humans these days. Announcing his latest innovation on New Year's Eve, Rauch's Doom CAPTCHA adds to a lengthy list of notable (and more serious/useful) feats, including authorship of Next.js, Mongoose, and Socket.IO, among other open source projects. The Doom CAPTCHA might take the title for most fun, though. That is, if you can cope with Doom on nightmare mode, the highest difficulty, which makes the demonic enemies harder to kill and more aggressive. Your correspondent did manage it on the first try, once we remembered that it's not immediately obvious how to strafe, and was left with a meager 19 percent health and a suitably bloodied and battered status bar face. Let us know if you fared any better in the comments. While the CAPTCHA is a WebAssembly app, Rauch built the flesh and bones in v0, Vercel's AI-powered web development agent announced in 2023, which generates projects from natural language prompts. You can see his process here. Since most web users find even the most basic CAPTCHA an annoying hoop to jump through, we don't see the nightmare Doom version gaining much traction outside the most sadistic devs implementing it as a joke or to intentionally annoy people. The CAPTCHA's legality is also potentially dubious. Only id Software's Doom game engine is open source, the game data - maps, textures, sprites, etc. - are not, but all look present and correct here. As The Register noted last year, OpenAI's GPT-4 is capable of playing the game - badly. Give it a few years, though, and similar AI models may make mincemeat of Doom on nightmare. So, once again, CAPTCHA's effectiveness as a bot defense comes into question.

Think CAPTCHAs are frustrating? Try the new Doom version

In brief: Being faced with a CAPTCHA is about as welcome as opening a Xmas present and finding it's a Humane Ai Pin. But a new variant offers a little more fun than clicking on boxes of specific items, though it is about 10 times more difficult: kill three demons on a secret level of Doom. Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart have been frustrating internet users for years. Preventing the likes of account-creating bots, spam, data-scaping, etc., is important, but it's hard to remember that fact when squinting at a squiggled word on the screen, or faced with the dilemma of whether that tiny bit of bicycle handle peeking into a square means you should select it. There are fewer anger-inducing CAPTCHAs these days, such as dragging items to locations and listening to audio clips - we also saw a Doom minigame in 2021. Now, there's a new CAPTCHA version of the iconic FPS, which you can try out here. The idea is to kill at least three demons. Good luck with that - it took me a lot of attempts before I managed it. As reported by TechCrunch, the latest Doom CAPTCHA is the work of Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product. He used his company's AI site builder to create the program. While it's a fun twist on classic CAPTCHAs, it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that people have been complaining about the Doom variant's difficulty. The reason why it's so hard is explained by commenter smitelli on Hacker News: this is actually the secret E1M9: Military Base level that players would normally encounter after E1M3. By this point in the game, you would have a shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and probably some armor. So, starting with just a pistol and no protection means this is going to be a challenge, especially as the difficulty level is set to Nightmare. There are also questions over just how well this program will work as a CAPTCHA, given that AI bots can be trained to play games like Doom. Still, it's better than clicking on traffic lights.

People are playing a new DOOM-themed CAPTCHA | TechCrunch

CAPTCHA programs that are used to determine whether a site visitor is a person or a bot come in pretty standard formats. Think text distortion (where users type the characters they see in a box amid other squiggles); image recognition (you're selecting, say, all the squares in a grid with a bicycle image); and checkbox verification (you click on that box that reads: "I am not a robot"). But Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product, just used the company's AI site builder to come up with a new twist on CAPTCHAs, one that invites users to play the classic single-player game DOOM and killing at least three monsters. You can check it out here. It's not a wholly original idea (the DOOM as CAPTCHA part). But it's nevertheless topping the charts over at Hacker News, whose audience of largely developers has notes, with some complaining it's too hard, another complimenting the project as "so metal," and another remarking: "There are so many monsters, took me 3-4 tries...just like a real captcha!"

The Doom-themed CAPTCHA is real and you can try it now

Prove you're not a robot by playing Doom. Credit: Eduardo Parra / Europa Press / Getty Images Proving you're human with a CAPTCHA test has never been more fun. Frontend development company Vercel used created Doom-themed CAPTCHA to show off its AI site builder, per TechCrunch. In order to pass the CAPTCHA, you need to kill three monsters in the popular first-person shooter game. According to the app site, the Doom CAPTCHA is meant for "for educational and entertainment purposes," so don't expect to have to prove your gaming skills every time you want to check your bank account. For that, you'll probably still have to click all the images that have stairs or motorcycles, and probably fail a few times as is the case with most CAPTCHAs. But this CAPTCHA is just as hard, if not harder. The app has tweaked the settings to make it more challenging, by increasing the speed and bumping the difficulty to "Nightmare" level. Still, judging by the buzz it has generated online, it hasn't stopped people from trying to beat the CAPTCHA and prove they're not robots. You can try the Doom-themed CAPTCHA for yourself by going to https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/. To pass the CAPTCHA on a desktop, use the arrow keys to aim and the spacebar to shoot. Good luck and happy hunting.

The Latest Version of 'Doom' Is a CAPTCHA

Doom may be over 30 years old, but people aren't sick of it yet. On the contrary: Fans have ported the action horror game to just about platform imaginable, from graphing calculators and treadmills to pregnancy tests. If it has a screen, it can probably run Doom. Given that, perhaps it isn't all that surprising that the latest port of Doom is designed to run in your internet browser. In fact, there are likely dozens of ways to access the original Doom online. What makes this version unique, however, is that you aren't just playing in a browser window, but in a CAPTCHA window. CAPTCHAs are, of course, the minute challenges you're hit with when trying to access something on the web that are intended to prove that you are, indeed, human, and not an automated bot. Some of the earliest CAPTCHAs asked you to type out a distorted series of characters -- something a robot (or perhaps, these days, a generative AI bot) would struggle to bypass itself. Since then, these types of challenges have advanced to cover a wide range of puzzles and tasks. Now, that includes a playable version of Doom. As reported by TechCrunch, the 1993-style CAPTCHA was built by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. The company just so happens to have an AI website builder, which Rauch used to build this port. You can try it out for yourself here. Although the game came out over three decades ago, and this version offers but a snippet of the full experience, this CAPTCHA version of Doom is not easy. The goal is simply to kill three enemies before the enemies kill you. You can use the arrow keys to move forward, backward, left, and right, and the space bar to shoot. That's it. However, as soon as you walk forward, enemies start firing at you, and death is close at hand. Part of the reason for the difficulty is the sheer amount of firepower coming at you from all directions. The CAPTCHA is set in a small arena, with a horde of monsters in a cage in the center, all flinging fire your way. There are four corridors leading out of the arena, all featuring even more enemies shooting at you. I can offer three pieces of advice from my short experience playing this CAPTCHA: One is to keep the space bar held down, to fire off as many shots as you possibly can. DOOM doesn't care about accuracy, so your objective is to simply face an enemies while shooting in order to hit them. The second is to ignore the enemies in the center cage: There are simply too many of them, and you'll quickly be overrun by fire. You're better off running past and trying to pick off the enemies in one of the corridors instead. As the monsters in the cage will be firing after you, they may hit and kill some of the enemies in the corridors, which won't contribute to your kill requirements, but will give you a split second of breathing room to target another enemy. Finally, I suggest taking at least one turn to run around the cage as many times as you can. You'll last longer than you'd expect, and you can watch the monsters in the cage mow down a ton of corridor enemies. Play your cards right, and you can use this tactic to snag three kills of your own, and win the CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, since there's no site to visit, you don't really win anything other than the game contained within. At least you've proved you're human. As TechCrunch highlights, this isn't even the first time Doom has been ported to CAPTCHA. Miquel Camps Orteza made the game a CAPTCHA back in 2021, but that offering was much more limited. Instead of being able to run around a small map, that CAPTCHA simply had you pick off immobile enemies one-by-one until you reached the four-kill quota. If you prefer your Doom: CAPTCHA to have more challenge and heightened stakes, stick with Rauch's.