If you don’t like decorating the halls with shiny decorations or Hallmark keepsakes, Jeroen Domburg has created a fantastically nerdy alternative: a small retro ornament for desktop computer complete with a functional screen that really reproduces Doom.
We’ve come across a handful of Christmas decorating hacks like these over the years, including a Miniature Nintendo Switch with a screen that plays GIFs of games from titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxeand a small retro television filled with a playlist of commercial classics of the holiday of the 90s. While popcorn on a long string was once considered to be all a Christmas tree needed to look festive, our demand for elaborate Christmas decorations has changed, and Domburg is now raising the bar even higher.
His tiny desktop PC, which seems inspired by the aggressive beige IBM workstations of the 1980s (even though it Doom didn’t arrive until late 1993), it was created using a 3D printer. The models used by Domburg are available via GitHub for anyone who wants to create their own. Instead of a classic Intel processor, the trim runs on an ESP32, and while Doom has been ported to it before, Domburg opted for a version of the first-person shooter that had been ported to the Game Boy Advance (and not the official launch of Doom GBA), because it made controller connectivity easier.
So while the ornament can work on its own, simply by playing through the demo mode of Doomthe tiny PC can also be connected to a Bluetooth controller for anyone who wants the mind-blowing challenge of hunting down baddies only a few millimeters tall. In its current form, it only offers single player gameplay, but we would love to see a two player version that also offers multiplayer. An entire tree covered in tiny gaming PCs Doomall networked, it’s the perfect Christmas morning we can imagine.