Even the most simple, stable game can’t run forever. In endless mode, I’ve gotten something as lowkey as 20 Minutes Till Dawn—a 2D pixelated game with only four colors—to crash a gaming PC. But what about the ever-venerable Doom? Someone did an incredible test and found that it’ll take the 1993 shooter literally years to crash.
So sayeth “Minki,” a poster and admin on the Len0w0 forum (via PCGamer). They crunched some numbers and estimated that it would take the Windows 3.1 port of the game 2.5 years before it hit an overflow state from the game engine. But that’s theoretical. So to prove it, they set up Doom on an ancient Asus MyPal Windows Mobile Pocket PC, which looks like the A620 from 2003 to me. (Good times.) The little gadget was plugged into 5 volts of power and an uninterruptible power supply.
As of yesterday, after approximately 2.5 years of the game running on its own, it finally crashed with the predicted overflow error. The poster says that the prediction was right on the money, with the program failing just hours after their original time estimate based on the variable math. It’s an impressive accomplishment, both for the computer science knowledge and actually setting up the experiment to a successful conclusion.