No: Doom did not run on gut bacteria. Lauren “Ren” Ramlan’s synthetic-biology class project modeled E. coli as a very slow fluorescent display. Doom’s game code ran on a standard computer, and the proposed 32×48 bacterial screen was simulated—not demonstrated as a living display.
What the Doom project actually did
Ramlan’s final project for MIT’s Principles of Synthetic Biology course asked how long it might take to show Doom using bacteria as pixels. The project page describes it as “simulating how long it would take to run Doom with bacteria as the display system.” Ramlan’s project page and Ars Technica’s January 31, 2024 report both make clear that this was a model, not footage of bacteria playing the game.
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In the concept, a regular computer would render each game frame and reduce it to a 32×48, one-bit black-and-white bitmap. A controller would then use a chemical repressor-operator system to prompt individual E. coli cells to express fluorescent protein or not. The resulting pattern of glowing and non-glowing cells would serve as a crude screen. The cells were not calculating Doom’s rules, processing its inputs, or running its code.
Ramlan described encoding the whole game in bacteria as “a behemoth feat that I cannot even imagine approaching.” The project’s more modest question was about the display bottleneck: how long would it take the cells to show successive images?
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How slow was the modeled display?
The figures below are estimates from Ramlan’s Python model, as reported by Ars Technica; they are not timings measured on a working bacterial Doom display.
| Modeled quantity | Estimate | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Display resolution | 32×48 one-bit pixels | A coarse black-and-white image, with each cell representing a pixel. |
| Time to reach peak display output | 70 minutes | Model estimate for the display’s response. |
| Approximate return to starting state | 8 hours and 20 minutes | Model estimate for the display cycle. |
| Equivalent frame rate | 0.00003 frames per second | Ars Technica’s conversion of the modeled timing. |
| Estimated time for a five-hour Doom run | 599 years | Ars Technica’s extrapolation from the modeled display rate, not a measured playthrough. |
Engadget’s January 30, 2024 coverage gives a similar estimate of around nine hours per frame and roughly 600 years for a full run. That shorthand describes a projection based on the model, not an experiment that ran for years.
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Is a bacterial display scientifically real?
Yes, engineered bacteria have been used as fluorescent displays, but that does not mean this Doom screen was built. A 2020 study in Molecular Systems Biology experimentally programmed E. coli to display digits from zero through nine using a seven-segment arrangement. Its genetic circuits selected which segments fluoresced; it was a different project with a simpler output than the proposed Doom grid.
The study, “Programming Escherichia coli to function as a digital display,” published March 5, 2020, reports seven strains with circuits containing up to 12 repressors and two activators. Across the design, the researchers used 63 regulators and 76,000 base pairs of DNA. Those figures describe the experimentally implemented digit display, not Ramlan’s Doom model.
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So, can you play Doom on anything?
The bacterial project is a clever way to explore how far the idea of a display can be pushed, but it does not prove that Doom can be played on any object or organism. In this case, a conventional computer would still do the gaming; the imagined bacteria would only show a low-resolution output, on a timescale far too slow for ordinary play. As Ramlan put it, “To run Doom, all one needs is a screen and willpower”—but the bacteria in this project were a modeled screen, not a playable one.
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