The Redbox Kiosk Can Run Doom

Your neighborhood Redbox kiosk is probably on its way to the scrapyard. That said, there's a non-zero chance that the 700-pound monstrosity has been rescued, placed in someone's garage, and forced to run Doom.

Redbox slipped into bankruptcy earlier this year and is now in liquidation. It has no money, and it has chosen to abandon its rental kiosks. So, preservationists and nerds are driving to grocery stores, dollar stores, and other retail locations to say, "I'll remove your Redbox kiosk for free if you let me keep it". Most business owners seem happy to oblige.

A community of Redbox preservationists are working around the clock to reverse-engineer their precious, power-hungry machines. Former Redbox technicians have graced the group by providing important assets, including copies of Redbox's operating system. And, yeah, we now have Doom running on a Redbox kiosk.

jandajanda2 / Reddit

Each Redbox kiosk contains an old workstation, such as the Dell Optiplex 390, running the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Embedded. So, playing an old game on a Redbox machine isn't such a crazy idea. And if you want to go the lazy route, you can just plug a modern PC into the Redbox kiosk's monitor. That's how one Redditor got the kiosk to "play" Minecraft.

We're also learning about some of Redbox's questionable security practices. Self-described "hardware necromancer" Foone came across a detailed list of 2471 transactions on a Redbox kiosk's hard drive. Each transaction is timestamped and accompanied by a customer's email address (partial credit card numbers are located elsewhere on the drive). These transactions date back to 2015, so they presumably span the lifetime of the machine.

Those interested in the Redbox preservation community should check out the /Redbox subreddit and hunt down the associated Discord channel, which is full of some very knowledgeable people.