People are playing a new DOOM-themed CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA programs that are used to determine whether a site visitor is a person or a bot come in pretty standard formats. Think text distortion (where users type the characters they see in a box amid other squiggles); image recognition (you’re selecting, say, all the squares in a grid with a bicycle image); and checkbox verification (you click on that box that reads: “I am not a robot”). 

But Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a front-end-as-a-service product, just used the company’s AI site builder to come up with a new twist on CAPTCHAs, one that invites users to play the classic single-player game DOOM and kill at least three monsters. You can check it out here.

It’s not a wholly original idea (the DOOM as CAPTCHA part). But it’s nevertheless topping the charts over at Hacker News, whose audience of largely developers has notes, with some complaining it’s too hard, another complimenting the project as “so metal,” and another remarking: “There are so many monsters, took me 3-4 tries…just like a real captcha!”