In this talk, I’ll take you through the strange and surprisingly fun journey behind Project Destino: a proof of concept to run Doom entirely inside the terminal using Node.js. What started as a joke — “what if we ran Doom in the terminal with Node.js?” — slowly turned into a real experiment in terminal graphics, native interoperability, and runtime performance.

I’ll show how I combined doomgeneric, OpenTUI, node:ffi, and SDL_mixer to build a fully interactive terminal-based Doom experience, with Node.js acting as the coordinator between rendering, input handling, audio, and the native game engine itself.