John Romero Reveals id Software Sold Empty Doom Boxes to Taiwanese Pirates
The Doom co-creator shared how id Software struck a deal with Taiwanese software pirates in the early 1990s, selling them empty boxes so local fans could get something resembling a legitimate copy.
A Very Unconventional Distribution Strategy
John Romero has shared a lot of wild stories about the early days of id Software over the years, but this one is particularly memorable. According to a report by PC Gamer, the Doom co-creator revealed that id Software once sold empty boxes to Taiwanese software pirates. The reasoning was surprisingly pragmatic: if fans in Taiwan were going to end up with pirated copies anyway, at least giving those copies something that looked like official packaging was better than nothing.
“For us, it was distribution,” Romero said, as reported by PC Gamer.
That single sentence does a lot of heavy lifting. It reframes what sounds like a shady arrangement into something almost endearing, a scrappy early-90s software studio trying to get its monster hit into the hands of players in a market it had no real foothold in.
The Piracy Problem of the Early PC Era
For anyone who lived through the floppy disk era of PC gaming, the piracy situation Romero is describing will ring familiar. International software distribution in the early 1990s was a patchwork of regional deals, import costs, and enormous logistical headaches. For a small Texas studio riding the wave of one of the most talked-about games of 1993, establishing a formal retail presence in Taiwan was not exactly a straightforward option.
Doom itself launched in December 1993 as shareware, meaning the first episode was freely distributed. That model worked brilliantly in North America, but the shareware channel did not automatically translate into clean, organized distribution overseas. In markets like Taiwan, where a thriving gray market for software already existed, bootleg copies of popular games spread fast.
Rather than simply losing that audience entirely, id Software found a workaround that was, at minimum, creative. By selling empty boxes to local pirates, those pirates could package the discs they were already copying into something that at least resembled a retail product. Fans got a box. id Software got some revenue. The pirates got a product to sell. Everyone came away with something, more or less.
Romero as Gaming Historian
Romero has increasingly taken on the role of keeper of early id Software lore in recent years. He is candid about the chaos and brilliance of that period, and stories like this one add texture to what has become a mythologized chapter of gaming history. Doom did not just change how people thought about first-person shooters. It changed how the industry thought about distribution, shareware, online communities, and modding.
The Taiwan box story is a footnote, but a telling one. It captures something real about how id Software operated: fast, informal, and willing to improvise when the conventional path was not available. There was no legal department agonizing over the optics. There was a game that people wanted, a market where formal channels did not exist, and a decision made on the fly.
Whether that arrangement would survive five minutes of scrutiny in today’s publishing environment is a different question entirely. But in 1993 and 1994, with Doom spreading across the world like something nobody had quite planned for, empty boxes shipped to Taiwanese pirates apparently qualified as a distribution strategy worth trying.
It is worth remembering that Doom turns 33 years old this December. The stories are still coming out.
Why did id Software sell empty boxes to Taiwanese pirates?
According to John Romero, id Software sold empty Doom boxes to Taiwanese pirates as an informal distribution strategy, so that fans in Taiwan could at least have what resembled a legitimate copy of the game. Romero described it as distribution rather than an endorsement of piracy.
Did id Software officially distribute Doom in Taiwan?
Not through conventional retail channels, based on what Romero has described. Selling empty boxes to local pirates was essentially id Software's workaround for getting the game into Taiwanese hands during a period when proper international distribution was difficult to arrange.
Who is John Romero?
John Romero is one of the co-founders of id Software and a lead designer on Doom, the landmark 1993 first-person shooter that helped define the genre. He has remained a prominent figure in FPS history and game development culture.