FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL

A programmer dropped FPS.cob, a first-person shooting game made in COBOL — the ancient business language most people associate with banks, not blasting monsters — and the community reacted exactly how you’d hope: with disbelief, suspicion, and a lot of joking chaos. The project promises two styles of levels, old-school maze action and a more DOOM-like setup with doors and height changes. In other words, this is either a glorious stunt or a cry for help, and readers were very ready to investigate.

The biggest early mood was basically: pics or it didn’t happen. Multiple commenters immediately begged for screenshots, with one flat-out saying, “Come on, we need screenshots!” Another turned up the heat by noting the repo had just a single commit and asking the question hanging over half the internet in 2026: “did you use AI?” That tiny jab added a whole mini-drama to what could have been a simple novelty post. Then came the practical reality check: one person said it didn’t run at all, reporting only “I/O errors and quits,” which is the fastest way to turn quirky hacker art into a comment-section pile-on.

But then the receipts arrived. Peter Cooper swooped in with a gameplay video, confirming that yes, this weird little thing is real — even if, as he put it, “it’s clunky, but it does play.” And in a surprise plot twist, someone praised the code itself as “pretty readable,” sparking the funniest hot take of all: maybe COBOL, the retirement-home coding language, was secretly cooking the whole time.