Fortnite can run Doom now, making it officially as useful as gut bacteria and rat neurons

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda Softworks

An Unreal Engine developer has got classic Doom running in Fortnite, in a manner of speaking broad enough to justify a series of headlines about it, including my own. Jackson Clayton honoured the proud tradition of getting the 1993 FPS to run on things where no Doom should be by porting classic opening stage E1M1, via level editor Ultimate Doom Builder, into Fortnite’s Unreal editor as a 3D model. Welcome, newcomer Fortnite, to the vaunted halls currently occupied by gut bacteria, jar-grown rat neurons, lawnmowers, teletext, electric toothbrushes, Windows notepad (sort of), and a pregnancy test.

The practical upshot of this is that Clayton is able to use Fornite’s building system in the level. Speaking to Kotaku, Clayton says that after porting the level over “it was mostly removing Unreal’s fancy effects to make everything unlit and unfiltered. I used Unreal’s material system to give the Doom Marine [sprite its] choppy spinning effect, and a PostProcess material to pixellate the screen and show the gun.”

The Unreal Editor For Fortnite (UEFF) is ““too high-level” for a one-to-one code translation, says Clayton, so he had to “get creative” to spin up a convincing facade of the FPS grandpappy inside the plucky Battle Royale also-ran. Clayton is also an indie dev, having released games like Castillo: The Nine Circles on Steam. Castillo is “Doom-inspired”, says Clayton, so the experience he’d built up helped with this worthy endevaour.

The main motivation behind all this? Clayton simply enjoys a little trolling. “I wanted to put together a video to trick my friends, so I ported the map and created the post-process materials, and they really liked it.”

Wait, wait, I missed one! Doom has also run on a jailbroken tractor! There’s plenty more on this Tumblr page if you fancy a bit of rabbit holing. My personal wishlist for the future of bizarre Doom ports include a digital casio watch, a vape, and also a furby somehow, hellish creatures that they are. Although my actual wishlist is just to get Doom: The Dark Ages running on my normal PC as soon as humanly possible.