Hopefully a joke doesn’t become a fad, because adding microtransactions to a 30-year-old game after the fact would be grossly unfair… but thankfully it seems like a joke.

The 1990s were a very different time. The Internet was not yet widely available, print newspapers and gaming magazines were much more in demand, and shareware was a common model. DOOM also used that model: the first part of the game, which could be distributed on floppy disks at the time, was free, the rest had to be bought.

But Guy Dupont thought we should stop thinking about what id Software’s FPS could run on (we’re still waiting for the toaster port) and concentrate on what we could put into the game. The developer participated in the Boston Stupid Shit Nobody Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon with a rather idiotic (but hilarious) project: microtransactions for DOOM! And he even made a video about it.

So the game starts as if nothing has changed. Then, at the first pickup, a QR code pops up that you scan with your phone and it takes you to a payment page. It’s both terrifying and incredibly funny. If today’s technology and Electronic Arts had existed back then (it was a very different direction; the company had made a name for itself with Road Rash), it would certainly have pulled this stunt: all pickups for money! Fortunately, the payment portal is a Potemkin village: it’s not real, because Dupont can jump through it with fake, fictitious data, and the “little Python server” he set up is probably only there to run the interface, not to handle microtransactions.

We need to STOP running DOOM on new things
and START putting new things into DOOM.

For example, today I added micro-transactions to the original game. Any time you pick up an item, the game freezes until you make a payment. pic.twitter.com/p9j9eYyOwJ

— Guy Dupont (@gvy_dvpont) April 13, 2024

It’s absolutely not the kind of thing we would have expected, but it’s done, and we give Dupont all the credit for it, because it’s both diabolical and brilliant.

Source: PCGamer, Boston Stupid Shit Nobody Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon