Beat 3 Enemies or Be Doomed to Repeat: The New Captcha Challenge!

Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch, has developed a unique DOOM captcha where users must eliminate three enemies in Nightmare mode to confirm their humanity. Hackaday reports that this captcha is a WebAssembly application, making it a perfect fit for tasks like graphics rendering, video processing, and gaming directly in a web browser.

Since the application runs in a browser and you might need to keep your mouse free for other tasks, you’re confined to using the arrow keys for navigation and the spacebar to shoot, much like the gaming setup familiar to those who played DOOM in the 1990s. Regrettably, the use of mouse for looking around or jumping to dodge is not permitted. However, you can enhance the experience and boost your survival odds by enabling cheats such as IDKFA (for all keys, weapons, ammo, and 200% armor) and IDDQD (for God mode).

The captcha starts you off with 50 bullets, no armor, and full health, setting a challenging stage to accomplish your task. A strategy we’ve found effective is to stay back and let the enemies approach. Once in range, unleashing your firepower proves surprisingly effective from afar.

While the DOOM captcha offers a dose of nostalgia and confirms your human status, it can be a source of aggravation for those not adept at video games, as it requires decent hand-eye coordination to achieve the necessary kills to pass. Conversely, it could effectively deter non-DOOM players from accessing certain web content.

The novelty of the DOOM captcha is unlikely to be addicting since it concludes automatically after the three required kills are achieved. Unfortunately, it only features one level, so users end up facing the same challenge repeatedly on sites that employ this captcha. It might have been more engaging if Rauch had integrated technology like Stable Diffusion to generate a unique level each time the captcha loads, though this could potentially lead to users getting too involved and neglecting their actual tasks.

Moreover, the effectiveness of this captcha as a genuine security measure to distinguish humans from bots remains uncertain. Recent studies have shown that AI programmed to play DOOM could surpass typical human players. Yet, it should suffice in preventing automated crawlers from accessing a site, particularly since these systems may not be programmed to “kill at least 3 monsters” as the captcha demands.