John Romero reveals id Software sold cheap boxes to Taiwanese pirates to spread Doom

At a QuakeCon 2026 panel, id Software co-founder John Romero revealed that the studio didn't just tolerate Taiwanese pirates copying and reselling Doom — it actively partnered with them, selling empty boxes at rock-bottom prices so fans in the region could at least have something physical in hand.

The story goes back to the shareware era of the early 90s. Doom's first episode was free to distribute, which meant pirates were already packaging and reselling it in stores across Taiwan with zero pushback from id. "You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it," Romero said. "It was awesome. We were totally happy with that." Rather than fight it, id Software contacted the biggest pirates in the market directly and offered them official boxes at heavily discounted rates. The pitch was blunt: "Please do it. Don't give us any money. Just get it out there." The logic was straightforward — id only made money when players ordered the full game after playing the free episode, so wider distribution meant more potential paying customers. "For us it was: distribution is king."

The shareware model was id Software's bread and butter through Wolfenstein 3D and into Doom, and it shaped the studio's unusually relaxed attitude toward copying. Romero framed it as a philosophical stance as much as a business decision — the studio came up in an era where copy protection was, in his words, "a war," and id simply decided not to fight it. "If people want to copy it, they're going to copy it," he said. "We only needed enough to make the next game." That pragmatism stands in sharp contrast to the DRM arms race that defined much of the following two decades, from disc-based copy protection schemes to always-online requirements that often punished legitimate buyers more than pirates.

The anecdote landed well at QuakeCon, where Romero has become a reliable source of candid industry history. It's a reminder that some of the most effective "anti-piracy" strategies in gaming history involved doing the opposite of fighting back.