It was inevitable. The moment Apple unveiled the OLED Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro in 2016, the collective consciousness of the internet didn't think about productivity macros or Photoshop sliders. No. They thought about id Software. They thought about 1993. They thought about whether a 2170 x 60 pixel strip of glass could actually run E1M1.
It can. Of course it can.
The Doom Mac Touch Bar phenomenon isn't just a meme. It is the modern-day "Hello World" for hardware hackers. If a device has a screen and a processor, someone is going to try to kill demons on it. But running Doom on the Touch Bar is uniquely chaotic because the aspect ratio is essentially a thin ribbon. You’re playing a game designed for 4:3 monitors on a display that is wider than it is tall by a factor of nearly 40 to 1. It’s ridiculous. It’s barely playable. And yet, it remains one of the most iconic displays of "because I can" engineering in the last decade of Mac history.
The Developer Behind the Chaos
We have Adam Bell to thank for this. Bell, an iOS engineer who has spent plenty of time poking at the internals of Apple’s ecosystems, was the first to really make it work. He didn't just stream a video of the game to the bar. He actually got the game engine running natively on the hardware.
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The technical hurdle here wasn't power. A modern MacBook Pro has enough juice to run thousands of instances of 1993's Doom simultaneously. The real trick was the bridgeOS. You see, the Touch Bar doesn't just run off macOS; it’s powered by a separate chip—originally the T1, then the T2—running a variant of watchOS. Bell had to figure out how to interface with that specific display layer.
When he finally got it running, the result was hilarious. Cacodemon sprites were squashed into tiny, 60-pixel tall blobs. The Doomguy’s face, usually the centerpiece of the HUD, looked like a panicked postage stamp. But the music played. The shotgun fired. It was Doom.
Why the Touch Bar Was a Weirdly Perfect Target
Apple’s Touch Bar was always a polarizing piece of tech. Professionals hated losing the physical Escape key (at least until the 16-inch model brought it back). Casual users often forgot it existed. But for the "It Runs Doom" community, it was a goldmine.
Most "It Runs Doom" projects involve old hardware—think printers, pregnancy tests, or smart fridges. The Doom Mac Touch Bar project was different because it was performed on a $3,000 piece of flagship hardware while it was still the current model. It felt like a rebellion against Apple’s strict control over the user interface. Apple wanted you to use the bar for predictive text and emoji; the internet wanted to use it to navigate the pits of Hell.
There's a specific nuance to how the Touch Bar handles graphics that made this possible. Because the bar is technically an external display in the eyes of the OS, developers can use frameworks like Core Animation to push frames to it. Bell’s implementation basically forced the game's render output into that narrow window. Honestly, looking at it for more than five minutes gives you a headache, but the technical achievement is undeniable.
Beyond the Meme: What This Taught Us About Apple Hardware
People often dismiss these projects as waste-of-time stunts. They’re wrong.
When hackers like Bell or those in the broader jailbreak community mess with things like the Doom Mac Touch Bar, they reveal the underlying architecture of our devices. This project showed us exactly how integrated—and yet how separate—the T-series chips were from the Intel processors. It highlighted the fact that the Touch Bar was essentially a tiny, elongated Apple Watch soldered onto a laptop keyboard.
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The Problem With the Aspect Ratio
The sheer absurdity of the 2170 x 60 resolution cannot be overstated. Standard Doom is 320 x 200. To fit it on the Touch Bar without cropping the sides, you have to scale it down so much that the enemies are literally 5 or 6 pixels tall. You aren't really playing the game at that point; you're just reacting to color shifts.
- Verticality: Non-existent.
- Navigation: You're basically guessing where the doors are.
- Aesthetics: Like looking at a masterpiece through a mail slot.
Despite this, others took the concept further. Some developers realized that if you couldn't play the whole game on the bar, you could at least use the bar to enhance the game. There are versions where the Touch Bar acts as the HUD (Heads-Up Display), showing your health, ammo, and inventory while the main game runs on the actual Retina display. This is actually... useful? It’s probably the most practical use of the Touch Bar ever conceived, which says a lot about Apple’s original implementation.
The Death of the Touch Bar and the Legacy of Doom
Apple eventually admitted defeat. With the release of the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBooks in 2021, the Touch Bar was scrapped in favor of the return of physical function keys. The "experiment" was over.
But the Doom Mac Touch Bar lives on in the archives of GitHub and YouTube. It serves as a time capsule of a specific era of Apple design—one where the company was willing to try something truly weird, and the developer community was ready to make it even weirder.
If you have an older MacBook Pro gathering dust in a drawer, you can still find the source code online to do this yourself. It involves a bit of tinkering with Xcode and bypassing some modern security hurdles, but seeing that tiny green marine on the glass strip is a rite of passage for any Mac enthusiast.
How to Experience Doom on a Mac Today
If you actually want to play Doom on a Mac—and I mean really play it, not just squint at a 60-pixel tall strip of glass—the landscape has never been better. You don't need to hack your keyboard anymore.
- GZDoom: This is the gold standard. It’s an open-source source port that runs natively on Apple Silicon. It adds support for high resolutions, 3D floors, and modern control schemes.
- Chocolate Doom: If you’re a purist and want the game to look and feel exactly like it did on a 486 PC in 1993, this is your best bet. It stays true to the original bugs and limitations.
- The Touch Bar HUD: For those who still have a Touch Bar-equipped Mac, look for "DoomTouch." It’s a specific mod that puts your health and ammo on the bar while the game runs on the main screen. It’s the perfect middle ground between "useful" and "ridiculous."
The reality is that the Doom Mac Touch Bar hack was never about gaming. It was about ownership. When you buy a piece of hardware, you should be able to run whatever code you want on it—even if that code is a 30-year-old demon-slaying simulator squeezed into a tiny glass rectangle. It’s a reminder that no matter how "locked down" a system seems, there is always a way to make it do something the manufacturer never intended.
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If you’re looking to try this yourself, your first stop should be Adam Bell’s GitHub repository. You’ll need a copy of the original DOOM.WAD file (which you can buy for a few dollars on Steam or GOG) and a willingness to wrestle with signing certificates in Apple’s developer environment. It isn't a one-click install. It requires patience. But the moment the "At Doom's Gate" theme starts playing from your keyboard, you'll realize it was worth the effort.
The Touch Bar might be dead as a product line, but as a platform for the most unnecessary version of Doom ever made, it will live forever in the halls of tech history. It’s a testament to the fact that developers will always find the most complicated way to do the simplest things, and we’re all the more entertained for it.
Actionable Next Steps
If you own a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar and want to join this niche club, start by downloading Xcode from the Mac App Store. You’ll need it to compile the project files found on GitHub. Search for "TouchBarDoom" to find the most stable forks of the original project. Ensure you have a legitimate WAD file, as the code doesn't include the game assets for legal reasons. For those without the hardware, watching the original 2016 demonstration videos is a great way to appreciate the absurdity without the technical headache.