Rats Play DOOM - Hacker News

Posted by ano-ther 12/12/2025

428 points | 159 commentspage 2

gpderetta 12/12/2025|

Well, the most cyberpunk thing I have read today. No video of rats killing Daemons though, only a promising but broken link.

k0ba 12/12/2025|

bUt liNk wOrks On mY cOmpUteR (seriously its not broken) ..but if so, check out this thread, tldr of the whole rodent VR setup: https://x.com/yolorun_capital/status/1996632980903620886?s=2...

gpderetta 12/15/2025|||

To be clear, I can read the article just fine, but there are no daemon-killing mice videos in the article, only a potentially interesting broken link.

flux3125 12/13/2025||

>Our rats (Todd, Kojima, Gabe) aged out before full testing.

A Carmack might've kept the system stable long enough

account42 12/15/2025|

They already tempted fate by having Gabe as the third rat.

huydotnet 12/13/2025||

While everyone training AI, this man train a rat. Are you gonna release the open weights (or the rat)?

Great project btw!

neilv 12/12/2025||

Treat those rats well, now that you've trained them for combat.

stephenlf 12/12/2025||

Doom aside (very impressive), I love the concept of putting rats on a roller ball instead of in a wheel for exercise. It would be better on their backs.

neuroelectron 12/13/2025||

A huge shortcoming with this setup is that rats don't just see in front of them, they see all around them. The screen right in front of his nose doesn't really simulate his environment the way it does for a human. Luckily doom has command line options for screens on the left and the right. But I imagine a lot of his awareness comes from what's above him.

shmeeed 12/12/2025||

checks notes I'm sorry, this doesn't qualify to run in the category "running DOOM on <device>"

a3w 12/12/2025||

Yet. 2035: running Doom on rat brains.

ValdikSS 12/12/2025|||

Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM? | Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw

shmeeed 12/13/2025||

Thanks! Just yesterday I was thinking it's high time for me to check if there's any progress on the Torrent Nexus, and here we are

shmeeed 12/12/2025|||

Would fit right in with LLMs' recent HN front page predictions.

cogman10 12/12/2025||

running rats on doom?

jeena 12/13/2025||

It's kind of amazing how similar this looks to a joke system my brother came up with in 2005: https://paradies.jeena.net/gourmetica-mentiri/2005/11/sysham...

Sardtok 12/13/2025||

In the year 2032, the rodrone wars broke out. What started as innocent video game experiments, had taken a dark turn. After the rats had perfected playing the classic Doom games in 2026, they were easily trained on more complex simulations. In 2028 the first rodent controlled surveillance drones were tested. The year after weaponised. And the first real deployments in warfare in 2030. They easily outperformed OpenAIs latest battle systems. Home robots were soon after remote controlled by rats, known as Rodots. Rodent intelligence escalated quickly as lab selections bred only the smartest specimens. It was only a matter of time before the takeover. Now rodots were building steadily more capable drones and bots. Long before humans could foresee the need for a defense against the rats, the rodrone attack on all humankind, was a fact...

jddj 12/13/2025||

Pets.com buys 8M sq feet of datacenter realestate in a deal with Oracle's liquidators, which is reported to include fitting the racks with hamster wheels and feeders. Sets sights on 400B IPO

st_goliath 12/13/2025|||

> rodent controlled surveillance drones

See also: WWII era, pigeon-controlled guided bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

chickenhun 12/12/2025|

Good news: Here's a cute video of Todd being habituated to the setup: https://x.com/yolorun_capital/status/1999598643339227564

Bad news: no video of them playing on this setup, just on the previous version. We iterated on v2 too long, our pet rats grew old and couldn't be trained. We open-sourced the hardware and software so others can build upon it. You can TLDR the whole thing in this thread: https://x.com/yolorun_capital/status/1996632980903620886?s=2...

...Also, here's my personal X, dm me if you have any questions, or would want to build it for a lab or for yourself: https://x.com/viktor_thoth

observationist 12/12/2025||

I was worried this was going to be one of the petri dish of neurons type things, but the reality of it was awesome. More gaming rigs for rats need to be developed - it looked like Todd was actually enjoying it, and you toned down the potentially scary bits in a good way.

Kudos for the experiment and giving your pet an awesome enriching environment!

zelphirkalt 12/13/2025||

From now on every future Doom game will have to contain a "rat" difficulty.

k0ba 12/12/2025|||

<<< just to verify, yes, he is The Rat Coach. Reach him out if you want to build something cool. (first post we made on the project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151150 )

Traubenfuchs 12/13/2025||

How can you go through this immense effort and not have and show a video of the rats playing?

More comments...