A camera researcher has managed to run Doom on a Hasselblad X2D, a medium-format camera that typically costs around $8,000 and is aimed at professional photographers. The work is part of an open-source firmware research project that explores features beyond what the factory settings allow. The creator, Radium Wang, stresses that the repository contains only source code, offline tools, and sanitized findings—not a way to "level up" the expensive hardware.
This isn't the first time Doom has appeared on a camera. A few months ago, another developer ported the game to an entry-level DSLR from 2010 with an 18-megapixel sensor—a polar opposite to the Hasselblad's 100-megapixel resolution. Both projects highlight how capable embedded systems have become, especially when compared to the original 1993 requirements of an Intel 386, 4 MB of RAM, and a VGA card.
Playing Doom on a camera's small touchscreen is hardly practical, and the medium-format body doesn't lend itself to gaming. But that's not the point. The project is part of the long-running "Can it run Doom?" meme, where programmers port the game to the most unlikely devices—from an electric cooking pot to an orbiting satellite. For Wang, the achievement is simply making something run somewhere unexpected, not creating a usable gaming platform.