While many people think of rats as pests, the rodents are actually highly intelligent animals.
Viktor Toth, 30, conducted the experiment to prove that rats are great decision makers and can be just as smart as humans whilst playing the shooting game, Doom.
The rodents, Carmack, Romero, and Tom, who are named after the video game's creators, were able to independently navigate themselves through a series of mazes, open doors and even shoot monsters.
The neuroscientist from Budapest, Hungary, built the virtual reality (VR) set-up to test just how smart rats are.
He said: 'I built a VR setup for rodents from scratch and trained three rats in an automated fashion.
'On average, rats are incredibly smart and you can teach them complex tasks.
'They have an exceptionally good memory and a special understanding when it comes to high level thinking and decision making.
'Rats can be taught very complex tasks and I wanted to teach them to move in the right direction of the game without me interfering.'
'To train them, the rats got rewarded with sugary water when they turned in the right direction.
'I put them on a moving ball which allowed them to play the game in first-person character - it took a lot of effort to teach them how to run on this but we got there in the end.'
Initially, the rats only played games featuring straight corridors and simple turns.
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