People have made the 1993 game Doom run on calculators, cameras and all kinds of unexpected hardware. But a luxury camera built to capture 100-megapixel photos? That’s a particularly expensive place to fight demons.

Independent researcher Radium Wang, known online as rrRadium, has demonstrated a Doom-engine game running on the original Hasselblad X2D 100C. Instead of a gamepad, the camera’s touchscreen handles movement, while a full press of its shutter button fires the weapon. Digital Camera World traced the footage to the researcher’s work.

How does a camera play Doom?

Modern digital cameras are specialized computers: they have processors, memory, displays and input controls. Wang adapted the portable doomgeneric game engine to the X2D’s interface, mapping touch controls and the physical shutter button to game actions. The documented test uses the freely distributable Freedoom game data, rather than redistributing the commercial Doom game files.

Wang’s public research notes limit the demonstration to the first-generation X2D 100C running firmware 4.2.0. The repository includes source and offline tests, but not a normal installer or a universal camera update.

It’s a technical experiment, not a new camera feature

The research notes describe earlier physical-camera testing, including shutter firing and touchscreen movement. The newly organized public source was checked offline rather than rerun on-camera during that release. Long-term stability, broad compatibility and full recovery in every configuration remain unproven.

That matters because modifying an expensive camera’s firmware can interrupt normal operation or even make it unusable. This is independent research, not an endorsed Hasselblad product. For context, the original X2D launched with a price of $8,199 in 2022; that is a historical launch price, not a current quote.

Why people keep porting Doom

Because the Doom engine’s source code is available, developers can use it as a playful test of a device’s display, timing, input and software access. The camera experiment connects to the broader open-source software story and the tools described in our Git and GitHub guide.

SmartNews takeaway: The impressive part isn’t that Doom is a good camera game. It’s that a researcher found a way to make a professional camera behave like an entirely different computer.

Editor’s Note: This is an experimental, unofficial demonstration. Do not treat the published research as a safe consumer installation guide.