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.

Rinsma explained that it’s already “relatively well-known” that PDFs can support a number of features such as dynamic content scripting when opened in something like Adobe Acrobat/Reader. Some of that same scripting support, however, is also available in both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chromium ’s respective PDF readers, PDF.js and PDFium.

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.

Github user ading2210 /vk6 has developed an unusual port of Doom. You can play it on its official website which, of course, is just a PDF file that can be downloaded on your system. It continues a long tradition of creative Doom ports, further enriching its historic legacy

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.

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.

A security analyst created a playable version of Tetris that lives within a PDF file. Gameplay is a janky, but the project shows a unique way to use inputs and outputs within a PDF file.