Doom Eternal Runs on a Fridge Thanks to xCloud

The Doom franchise is no stranger to being installed on unexpected devices, but this might be its most delicious yet.

Instagram user Richard Mallard has managed to run Doom Eternal on his Samsung fridge thanks to xCloud.

Spotted by the Verge, Mallard shared a video of his results to his personal profile on Monday, showing an early level of Doom Eternal running and responding to his Xbox controller inputs on the Samsung fridge’s screen. Mallard achieved this by sideloading the Android version of the Xbox Game Pass app onto his not-so-mobile device.

The app actually manages to portray the correct aspect ratio on the Samsung fridge’s screen, although the screen is formatted in portrait mode, so there’s several inches of unused space. Nevertheless, the game appears to run about as smooth as you could hope for on a cloud streaming service.

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Mallard also managed to play Gears 5 multiplayer on his Samsung fridge in a subsequent video.

Of course, the Doom franchise is no stranger to being loaded onto hilariously small and/or atypical devices, although it’s usually the original 2.39MB Doom from 1993. Just last September, a programmer ran a visually rough version of Doom on a pregnancy test. Add it to the list of weird devices to play Doom on, including a Microwave, a Leapfrog educational toy, and this laptop from the set of Friends.

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Funny enough, this means the xCloud game streaming service is technically available on the Samsung smart fridge before iPhones or iPads. Apple’s app guidelines make putting a service like xCloud on iOS a particularly complicated process. Apple allows for streaming services to be put on iOS as apps, but only as a “catalog app” that lets users sign up for the service and see what titles are available. Most notably, Apple requires that each game would need to have its own separate app on the iOS App Store, which doesn’t exactly work for a service like Xbox’s Game Pass, where every available title is centralized through one launcher.

Despite that hassle, Xbox head Phil Spencer allegedly indicated in an internal all-hands on meeting at Microsoft that xCloud “absolutely will end up on iOS” via a browser-based solution. Amazon’s recently announced Luna service may point at Xbox’s alleged plan. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/fridge admirer for IGN. You can open your heart and fridge to him on Twitter.

from IGN Video Games