The question has followed DOOM onto all sorts of unlikely devices. Now Boss Fight Books is turning it into a book. But Can It Run DOOM?, by David L. Craddock, is funding on Kickstarter after a November 10 launch, looking beyond the viral clips to ask how those projects worked and why their creators bothered.
Craddock is already a familiar name in games history, with books covering subjects including arcade conversions and id Software. In a new interview published by Boss Fight Books on November 11, he says short news articles about unusual DOOM ports left him wanting more detail. The book grew out of contacting the people behind the projects and following those technical stories further.
That should make this more interesting than a printed list of things with DOOM on their screens. Craddock specifically discusses the difference between a device actually running the game and a device being adapted to show it. His example is Alice Averlong’s pregnancy-test project, which he says does not literally run on the pregnancy test. The oddity is still there; the explanation is the part that usually gets lost.
The publisher also describes an additional section including conversations with DOOM‘s creators, including John Romero, John Carmack and Tom Hall, with Romero covering the foreword. This is a crowdfunding announcement, not a review of a finished book or confirmation that copies are shipping. Reward formats, delivery estimates and the contents of each edition belong to the campaign listing, and those details can change as the project develops.
For readers who enjoyed seeing DOOM become part of Evercade’s hardware lineup, this takes the curiosity in a different direction. The subject is the people who keep squeezing familiar software into unfamiliar places, and the decisions hidden behind a ten-second clip. That seems like a good reason to put the joke on paper.
Source: Boss Fight Books
