Doom Is Now Officially Being Played By A Fly Brain

Google Used AI To Reconstruct A Fly Brain, So People Made It Play Doom Custom image created by James Lucas. Published Sep 9, 2026, 6:10 AM EDT James Lucas is an Executive Editor at TheGamer who has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. An expert on FPS games, Soulslikes, RPGs, and survival horror, James has intimate knowledge of a wide variety of titles, providing in-depth coverage and exclusive profiles. Some of the games they have extensively covered include: Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike, Elden Ring, and Fallout. They pride themselves on their consistently thorough research, leveraging nearly a decade of industry experience. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com A new research project led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus, in collaboration with Google, has compiled a complete diagram of a male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system, mapping over 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections. Researchers sectioned the brain into millions of ultra-thin slices and used high-resolution imaging, AI, and human proofreading to reconstruct the entire nervous system in 3D, which could have enormous implications for neuroscience, biology, and medicine, helping researchers better understand neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and depression. Researchers are even looking toward mapping larger and more complex brains like mice and Zebrafish. So, naturally, people made it play Doom. “I’m training a fly brain to play Doom using the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome,” software engineer Alex Wormuth posted on X. “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons. Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement. Will the fly learn to survive?” Wormuth set up a livestream for the fruit fly, so that curious onlookers can keep tabs on the experiment. There’s a built-in UI on the page that displays the fly’s health, ammo, and kills, a live look at neural activity and sensory input, and a graph showing its memory input and synapse strength. While it's tempting to say that a digital fly brain is learning to play Doom, that's not exactly what's happening. The project is an experimental software model based on the fly's connectome, with significant approximations made to simulate its neural activity. Google makes it clear that a connectome is a static anatomical snapshot, rather than a complete model simulating everything that would happen inside a living brain. Think of it like a map rather than a 1:1 simulation. Because this project isn't a simulation of a complete living brain, there's no evidence that the digital fly has anything resembling consciousness or subjective experience, meaning programmers aren't torturing a digital fly when they send it to literal Hell to fight pixelated demons. The Fly Brain Has Even Been Used To Make A Fly Mob In Minecraft There have been other experiments that see the fly brain subjected to Super Mario 64 and even Beat Saber, while others are adding it to Minecraft as a brand-new mob, using simulated neural activity to drive its movement. It’s unclear how many of these are vibecoded (i.e. churned out solely with AI), which is controversial for a whole cocktail of reasons, with AI-generated development often resulting in messier code that can be significantly harder for humans to review, polluting the scene with slop. But some developers have openly admitted to using AI to help with development. Several of these are open source and accessible via GitHub, so those of you who are more tech-savvy can verify for yourselves. Wormuth's livestream, however, appears to have been assisted by ChatGPT. Whatever the case, there’s something disturbingly human about being handed a fruit fly brain, or at least the mapped neurons of one, and immediately forcing it to play video games. Released December 10, 1993 ESRB M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language Developer(s) id Software Publisher(s) id Software Engine Doom engine Genre(s) First-Person Shooter