Doom for dinner

Family Hub refrigerator. © Samsung.

Using Microsoft’s xCloud service and a little ingenuity, Richard Mallard has managed to get Doom Eternal running on a Samsung smart fridge. The trick was to sideload the Android version of the Xbox Game Pass app onto his fridge. The video of this coup of engineering shows the game working flawlessly and responding to the Xbox controller’s commands. Amusingly, this means Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming service is available on Samsung fridges before it’s launched on an iPad or iPhone. Apple’s policy on applications mean that implementing an xCloud service on iOS is an extremely long and complex process. Despite this problem, Xbox chief Phil Spencer said at a staff meeting at Microsoft that xCloud “absolutely will end up on iOS”, probably in early 2021, thanks to a browser-based solution. The question to ask, then, before purchasing any appliance with a screen is: can it run Doom? The answer is probably yes, depending on how much work you want to put into it. Recently, we saw the original, 1993 version of Doom playing on an electronic pregnancy test and on a microwave oven. We’re willing to bet that Spencer never imagined the refrigerator platform for xCloud.

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, “Here’s Doom running on a Samsung fridge thanks to xCloud.”