Stop doomscrolling on Twitter and start… Doom Scrolling

Are you concerned about the state of the world? Tired of reading about Tory party incompetence and sleaze in the UK? Getting a headache from reading about the bloody Ottowa protesters and that Canadian vaccine mandate? Can’t stand to read another word about Europe and Russia staring each other in the eye over a potential Ukrainian war?

Well, we’ve got just the ticket. Stop doomscrolling, and start Doom Scrolling with this new Twitter bot

that is posting a still from a playthrough of Ultimate Doom – starting from the end. Work your way backwards through hell as the account, once per hour, posts an image from the game. And don’t worry about it running out; there’s a good 15,770 images to get through.

Enough to stop you fretting about the threat of a global thermonuclear war for a little while, at least (almost for two years, if the account posts one image per hour, by our maths).

This isn’t the first bot we’ve seen someone riff on the ol’ doomscrolling name for a bit of a lark: last year, we saw Tweet2Doom, a Twitter bot that allowed you to send replies to the account with a list of actions – move, turn, shoot, etc. – and get a video clip of Doom showing the results in a reply. Our colleagues at RockPaperShotgun wrote about that one, and their article gives a pretty good insight into how the bot works.

Watching a glacial playthrough of Doom is just the most recent novel way of enjoying the title. The game has a long series of peculiar manifestations – whether it’s on a pregnancy test or on a fridge, within Minecraft or running on even the most rudimentary phones, iD Software’s classic game just keeps turning up everywhere.

Thanks to tonybab on Twitter for the heads-up on this story. Doom meme image credit: kurokkiii.