A Clump of Human Brain Cells on a Computer Chip Learned to Play the Nostalgic Video Game ‘Doom’

The technology could one day help researchers develop drugs and tailor treatments to individual patients

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

March 27, 2026

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No, this isn’t science fiction. Real-life researchers taught a dish of roughly 200,000 living human brain cells to play the classic 1990s computer game “Doom.”

Experts at Cortical Labs, an Australian biotech company, completed the feat as part of developing the “world’s first code deployable biological computer,” which runs on nerve cells, or neurons, grown on a silicon chip. The team announced that a clump of cells could play the first-person shooter game—although not very well—in a video posted in February.

Living Human Brain Cells Play DOOM on a CL1

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A few years ago, Cortical Labs announced that it had trained about 800,000 cells cultured on a computer chip to play “Pong,” a simulated table tennis game from the 1970s. Immediately after, comments all making a certain request came flooding in.

“The Internet always asks, ‘Can it play ‘Doom’?’” Alon Loeffler, a synthetic biological intelligence scientist at Cortical Labs, tells Nature’s Rachel Fieldhouse.

The neurons used in the project largely come from the company’s CEO, Hon Weng Chong, although not from his brain, reports Rich Pelley at the Guardian. He previously donated some of his blood to the cause. Researchers extracted white blood cells from the sample and reprogrammed them into stem cells. These special cells can continue making copies of themselves and turn into other types of cells.

“Essentially, we reverse the biological clock back to an embryonic state, induce them into neurons, and put them on a glass chip roughly the size of a [coin],” Chong tells the Guardian. “Because they’re on a chip—and electricity is the common language between neurons and the computer system—we can interface with them and get them to play ‘Doom.’”

Using a Cortical Labs biocomputer, the team mapped the video feed from the game into patterns of neural stimulation. For instance, when a demon appears on the left of the screen, certain electrodes stimulate the left side of the neuron clump’s sensory area, David Hogan, chief technology officer of Cortical Labs, says in the video. Then, the researchers noted the cells’ responses—electrical spikes—and converted that to motor commands. Different patterns of activity got coded into distinct actions in the game, such as shooting or moving right.   

While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.”  

This game is far more complex than ‘Pong,’ so “successfully interacting with it highlights real advances in how living neural systems can be controlled and trained,” says Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England who was not involved in the work, to Alex Wilkins at New Scientist.

Still, scientists don’t fully understand how the neurons play the game, Steve Furber, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester in England, tells the outlet. For example, they don’t know how the cells know what’s expected of them or what’s on the screen, he notes.

Building biocomputers has implications beyond winning at nostalgic video games. Chong tells the Guardian that while he’d like to try getting the neurons to play “Pokémon” next, the real goal is to use the technology for medicine.

“People are looking at it from biomedical research angles, for disease modelling,” he says to the outlet. “Things like epilepsy, where drugs could be tested on neurons grown outside the body—not just to discover new drugs, but to tailor them at a personal level.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.