Someone Just Told a Satellite in Space to Play Doom — By Voice — And It Actually Worked

People have found astonishingly odd places to run Doom over the years — pregnancy tests, a clump of cultured brain cells, you name it. So it's almost unsurprising that, back in 2025, a software developer from Iceland got Doom running on the European Space Agency's OPS-SAT satellite. What's new is how it happened the second time around.

Almost exactly a year later, a satellite has pulled off the trick again — only this time, it was triggered by voice command, a genuine first for any satellite.

How It Worked

Tanagra Space, an amateur radio group based in Oslo, transmitted a voice command over the 23 cm band directly to ESA's experimental OPS-SAT PRETTY satellite. The message: "PRETTY PLAY DOOM."

The satellite used onboard AI to capture the radio signal, decode it out of the noise, transcribe the speech, recognise the command, and then launch the 1993 demon-slaying classic — all without human intervention on the receiving end. As proof, the satellite transmitted back a digital "postcard" confirming it was, in fact, running Doom.

Tanagra Space reportedly managed the feat twice in a single day: first with a synthesised voice loop, and later with an actual person speaking live into a microphone.

There's a Serious Point Buried in Here

Underneath the novelty, there's a genuinely practical application. A satellite capable of understanding natural language, or recognising audio-style patterns more generally, could be used to listen for emergency Mayday calls from stranded ships, or flag unexpected astronomical events like gamma-ray bursts as they happen — processing and responding to raw signal data in real time, entirely on its own.

But that's the future. For now, we've got a satellite up in orbit playing video games when it should probably be doing science. Thoroughly irresponsible — and thoroughly brilliant.