One day, the classic 90s shooter Doom will be playable on every single electronic device with a screen. We aren’t quite there yet, but thanks to some crafty hackers you can now play id’s seminal shooter on a jailbroken farm tractor because we live in the weirdest, dumbest cyberpunk future imaginable.
Over the weekend in Las Vegas, DefCon 2022—a large annual convention dedicated to hacking and computers—happened and, during the event, some modders showed off a jailbroken tractor computer. The tractor computer was hacked by Sick Codes as part of an effort to bring more awareness to how little control farmers have over their own equipment, which is often running proprietary software and can’t be easily modded or repaired.
After months of work using numerous John Deere tractor models and computers, the Australian modder was able to get root access and open the tractor’s computer wide open.
“Liberate the tractors!” the modder told Wired, “We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”
Of course, the right to repair and allowing people to fully modify and control the things they own is extremely important—especially when it comes to something like farming, where broken-down tractors could lead to food shortages—but also, gaining complete access to the hacked computer let Sick Codes have some fun. So they naturally got Doom running on the device.
Sick Codes used the source port Dehacked Doom and with some help from another modder, Skelegant, was able to create a farm-themed Doom mod that is fully playable on the John Deere tractor’s jailbroken system.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Doom running on something other than a game console or PC. In fact, for years and years, people have ported id’s classic FPS to tons of various things, including (but not limited to) pregnancy tests, cash registers, other games, and even potato-powered calculators. Now we can add John Deere tractors to the list.
