It is customary to have CAPTCHA on most of the sites on the Internet. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test. It is simply a validation tool that differentiates real users and automated bots.
We are all aware of going through boing CAPTCHAs like selecting road walks or traffic lights or boats from a picture grid or just entering words displayed in a box. In an attempt to make it fun, a programmer from Spain came out with a mini-game in the form of a CAPTCHA.
How do you pass the CAPTCHA?
Miquel Camps Orteza was the man behind this innovative Doom-themed CAPTCHA. Miquel implemented the concept of the popular first-person Shooter (FPS) game of the 90s named Doom. A small screen appears with a devil-like zombie. The image of the zombie will appear in different areas.
You will have to shoot down the devil four times in around 8 seconds to pass the test. You can restart the game if you fail in the first trial. The aim controller becomes red upon hovering over the zombie which is the sign to shoot (click). For desktop users, a cheat code (IDDQD) can pass the test too. Overall, shooting accompanied by the loud gunshot sound effects and the background music reconnects the users with the original game.
More on Miquel, the creator of Doom Captcha
Miquel is a skilled developer. It is common for programmers to showcase their skills via games and programs to catch the eyes of industrial people and companies. For the same purpose, Orteza created this game to get the attention of the employers. This is not the first time; he has developed many iconic programs.
Previously, he has coded a similar CAPTCHA test which included squats. The program would launch a cam and the user must do 10 squats to pass the test. In fact, his portfolio is filled with creative apps which demonstrate his expertise in different areas like web extensions, WordPress, API, coded applications, and many more.
The reason behind the CAPTCHA
According to Miquel, the nostalgic game was purely developed for fun. He further stated the lack of security integration in the Doom-themed CAPTCHA. “Don’t take this too seriously, this is a little project for fun, if do you know how to code it’s pretty easy to break the security of this”, he wrote on his GitHub page. Generally, there are two sides to authenticating a CAPTCHA. The Doom CAPTCHA is only verified from the client side but there is no code for backend server validation. It was just a simple coding project to introduce some fun sides to the traditional CAPTCHA.
As soon as they released it, users admired the concept and showed immense love as it was close to addressing their feelings. There are better programs out there however, in terms of entertainment, it surpasses them. In a short time, it reached the top spot in Product Hunt. The program code was made available on GitHub from where it could be downloaded and embedded in forms.
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