Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has spent his spare time on the only engineering challenge that truly matters: running Doom in Microsoft Paint. The project, published on GitHub under the name DoomPaint, does not actually make Paint compute anything — a point Russinovich stresses himself. Paint merely renders what it is fed; computation remains someone else's problem.

The plumbing works like this: ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Every frame is pushed through the Windows clipboard as a Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint sits in the foreground, and the sound effects come straight from the game engine. The framerate, by The Register's own testing, is not exactly fluid — but it works, and it has audio, which is more than can be said for many serious enterprise deployments.

Russinovich notes that earlier Doom-in-Paint efforts merely mirrored a separate render window into Paint, whereas his version routes every frame through the clipboard proper. He also cheerfully admits the code was whipped up with Claude's help, describing such projects as the frivolous counterpart to his serious research work with AI models. It was perhaps inevitable that vibe-coding and the 'Can it run Doom?' canon would collide — last year Claude already assisted a KiCad port rendering Doom in PCB vectors.

Azure presumably presents its CTO with more pressing matters. Few of them will be this gloriously pointless.