There’s a more serious background to this, though. As Wired reports, a hacker known as Sick Codes presented a new jailbreak for John Deere & Co. tractors at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas. Digital locks are imposed on vehicles by manufacturers, preventing farmers from modifying and repairing their own equipment. The right-to-repair has proven controversial in the farming industry, but Sick Codes has found a workaround. Watch on YouTube Eurogamer Newscast: Are Sony and Microsoft’s squabbles over Call of Duty just business as usual? “Farmers prefer the older equipment simply because they want reliability. They don’t want stuff to go wrong at the most important part of the year when they have to pull stuff out of the ground,” said Sick Codes. “So that’s what we should all want too. We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.” Naturally, though, the first thing to test the jailbreak was to install Doom.
The hack was done using DeHacked Doom with the help of Doom modder Skelegant. And, of course, it’s been turned into a farming version of the shooter, riding a tractor around a demon-infested farm. The tractor now joins the likes of Twitter, a fridge, and a pregnancy test as capable of playing Doom.
