1993 Doom gets ray tracing, for real

3.5

You’ve played Doom Eternal with ray tracing, you’ve played Quake 2 with ray tracing, and now it’s time to reach even further into the past and play the original 1993 Doom with ray tracing. Yes, today is April Fools Day, but this falls into the best category of April 1 gags – a sudden update that brings a cool, weird, and very real new feature to a classic game.

Modder sultim-t has added real time path tracing to the PrBoom source port of the original Doom, which will let you enjoy the beauty of bleeding-edge lighting techniques through the game’s first three episodes. You can download sultim-t’s modded PrBoom for yourself on GitHub, though you will, of course, need to provide your own copy of the DOOM.wad file.

The results are… weird, but undeniably striking, as you can see in the trailer below. The simple textures and basic geometry of these old levels help the advanced lighting stand out even better than it does when applied to more complex modern games.

Check it out for yourself below.