Weird and wonderful things you can play Doom on number 28: A robot lawnmower (yes, really)

'It runs Doom' is a meme you're doubtless familiar with (as well as 'Can it run Crysis?') and the latest weird and wonderful device Doom runs on is a lawnmower.

Confused? We don't blame you, but it's true. Some enterprising souls (or perhaps, more accurately, damned ones) have managed to port the 1993 shooter to a robot lawnmower.

This is a Husqvarna Automower (NERA) with a small integrated display, which the game can be rendered on, and then played using a control knob below. The latter can be used to turn the player left or right, you can press the Start button of the mower to move forward, and press in the control knob to fire.

Obviously this is a pretty basic implementation of Doom, but it works well enough by all accounts, according to those who've experienced the mower-based version at DreamHack Winter 2023 (in Sweden).

Doom will be coming to Husqvarna lawnmower NERA models on April 9 via an update for the device, but sadly, it won't be on the mower permanently - only until September 9, in fact.

Also, this only applies to European countries, and also Australia (and New Zealand), but sadly US gardeners keen on old-school shooters are out of luck.

In case you're wondering what you get to play, apparently it's the whole of Episode 1 ('Knee-Deep in the Dead') and this is an officially licensed adaption. (Although Husqvarna notes that ZeniMax is not responsible for the performance of Doom on Automower hardware, to no one's great surprise.)

LAWN party

Believe it or not, at the DreamHack event in November last year, Husqvarna organized its own 'LAWN' party (do you see what they did there?), which was apparently the first multiplayer competition for Doom ever played on a non-gaming device.

The qualification for the tournament was completed via a time trial in single player, but the semis and finals were held in deathmatch mode on the main stage at DreamHack, which must have been quite the spectacle.

Surely the next step is to get Doom running on a chainsaw? If there are any chainsaws out there that have a display. (Smart chainsaws - do they exist yet? And if not, why not?).

All of this gets us nostalgic for a game even older than Doom. We're talking about Jeff Minter's classic Hover Bovver on the Commodore 64, of course (you can keep your Lawn Mowing Simulator nonsense).

Can we play that on a lawnmower as some kind of supremely ironic gaming statement? Well, no, we can't, but you never know what the future might hold....