A Teen Rigged a McDonald's Cash Register to Play 'Doom'

First released in 1993, the first-person shooter game Doom has since been played on nearly everything possible, from early 2000s point-and-shoot digital cameras to billboard trucks and the now-discontinued Zune music player. Those unconventional Doom-playing devices have all been logged on the site It Runs Doom!, as VICE explored in 2016, and as of this week, it can now add “McDonald’s cash register” to its extensive catalogue.

On Sunday, a 19-year-old Twitter user named Ryan Edgar, as identified by Kotaku, posted a picture of Doom’s iconic interface—a scowling face beneath a hand aiming a gun—on the screen of a McDonald’s cash register. It was captioned, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you DOOM… …. ….. Running on a McDonald's cash register." People are clearly impressed; as of this writing, Edgar's post has since picked up over 21,000 likes and close to 6,000 retweets.

As Edgar told Kotaku, a nearby McDonald's was offloading its old point-of-sale systems and allowed him to take one home, where he "downloaded ZDOOM (Doom XP) on it using [his] personal computer, plugged it into the USB in the cash register and ran it through there with auto run." People have pointed out in the comments that POS systems like this one are basically just computers anyway, but Edgar's new gaming console is still a fun gimmick.

It's not the first time smart hackers have found their way around McDonalds's computer systems this year. In a brief moment of glory this April, a group of Australians figured out how to game the self-service kiosks in order to score free hamburgers (each of which, unfortunately, came with an additional 10 burger buns), and just two months before that, a Nova Scotia woman claimed that an app vulnerability allowed someone in Montreal to order $500 worth of McDonald's on her account over the course of five days. At least this way, nobody gets screwed over—save for all the demons that get destroyed while playing Doom on the old cash register.