Ólafur Waage and collaborators ran DOOM on the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT spacecraft, but it was not a normal, live-playable game session. The satellite had no screen, and the team could not provide real-time player input. Their experiment began with text output and later produced screenshots that used processed photos from OPS-SAT’s camera as the game’s background.
What happened aboard OPS-SAT
Waage’s project repository records initial DOOM demo checks at 18:16:36 UTC on 28 December 2023. On 23 March 2024, the project ran the game with images captured by OPS-SAT’s onboard camera used as gameplay backgrounds. The repository also records that the OPS-SAT mission ended on 22 May 2024, so this is a completed experiment, not a game currently running as an active satellite service.
The work was a sanctioned experiment associated with an ESA hacking challenge, not evidence of a security breach. Here, “hacker” refers to experimenting with software on spacecraft hardware in an authorized setting.
How could DOOM run without a screen?
The first stage: text output
OPS-SAT had no onboard screen. In Bruno Ferreira’s Tom’s Hardware report, Waage described the first approach using Chocolate Doom, which produced text output rather than graphics. The reported output included the game’s completion status and enemy counts. The team also faced limited software dependencies and short windows to upload and run code, ruling out real-time player input. Waage joked that “even if it did, you’d need a really good telescope,” as quoted in Ferreira’s report.
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The later stage: generated screenshots
For a graphical result, the team moved to doomgeneric, a source-port basis documented in the project repository. They directed the game’s output to a virtual video card and generated screenshots. That made it possible to see images from the game without a physical display aboard the spacecraft; it did not turn OPS-SAT into a conventional gaming screen or enable ordinary interactive play.
How Earth photos became DOOM backgrounds
The team used photographs from OPS-SAT’s camera as outdoor scenes in the game. The images were resized and reduced to fit DOOM’s visual constraints, and the game’s color palette was adjusted to better suit the Earth imagery. The result was a game image built from spacecraft camera photographs—not a live view from a cockpit-style display.
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The repository documents an ARM32 onboard-computer build and a workflow for packaging software for spacecraft uplink. It also describes the image and palette adaptations. Together with the account of generated screenshots, this explains how a classic PC game could be adapted to run on the satellite’s computer and produce a visual output that could be inspected without a screen in orbit.
How the two demonstrations differed
| Stage | Output | Interaction | Visual source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial run | Text output, including completion status and enemy counts, as reported by Tom’s Hardware | No real-time player input, according to Tom’s Hardware | Game output rendered as text |
| Later image-producing run | Generated screenshots, as reported by Tom’s Hardware | No ordinary live gameplay described | DOOM graphics with processed OPS-SAT camera photographs as backgrounds |
What “DOOM in space” does—and doesn’t—mean
The phrase describes software running on a spacecraft’s onboard computer. It does not mean an astronaut played DOOM on a satellite monitor, that the game was controlled live from Earth, or that the satellite was carrying out a scientific study through gameplay. The distinctive visual achievement was adapting camera images into the game and producing screenshots from the experiment.
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