Doom shareware WAD: the free episode id sold to pirates

id Software put Doom's first episode out as free shareware on December 10, 1993. It spread so far that pirates in Taiwan were copying it, and id's answer to them, by John Romero's account, was to sell them boxes.

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Five people built Doom on NeXT computers

id began planning a darker 3D game in May 1992 and started development that November. The first team had five members: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. Dave Taylor joined later as a third programmer, and Jay Wilbur came on as the company's only business hire.

They worked on NeXT computers running NeXTSTEP and wrote the game mostly in C with some assembly. The artists photographed stop-motion models and digitized them into sprites. Robert Prince composed the music.

The design went through a fight. Hall's design document was rejected and most of his story was dropped. He was fired in July 1993, and Sandy Petersen replaced him in September, ten weeks before release. Carmack added multiplayer in late 1993, in the last months of work.

The upload crashed a university network

The plan was to put the first episode on a University of Wisconsin-Madison FTP server at midnight. The team could not connect at first, and the network administrator had to raise the number of connections. The upload finished 30 minutes later. When it did, 10,000 people tried to download at once and the university's network went down.

id bought a single ad in a gaming magazine. Wilbur believed the mainstream press had no interest in the game. The rest of id's reach came from people copying the file.

What the shareware version contains

The free download held the first episode, "Knee-Deep in the Dead": nine levels in which you play the last marine on a moon base. The full game had three episodes of eight main levels each. Two more episodes, "The Shores of Hell" and "Inferno," made up the rest.

id's money came from mail orders for the full game. The planned price was $40, with up to 85 percent of direct sales going to id. Wilbur let retailers sell the free episode at any price they chose. Romero later said a shopper would see 10 different boxes with the same shareware Doom in them.

Wilbur reported more than 65,000 copies sold by May 1994 and said the game had been downloaded 20 million times by June 1996. All versions combined sold 3.5 million copies by the end of 1999. The Ultimate Doom, which added a fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed," sold over 780,000 units by September 1999.

DOOM1.WAD would not load anyone else's levels

The free episode lived in one data file, DOOM1.WAD, while the registered game read DOOM.WAD. Keeping levels and graphics apart from the engine was deliberate. Tom Hall named the format, and WAD stands for "Where's All the Data?" Carmack backed the split as the "hacker ideal of people sharing and building upon each other's work." Romero had hacked games when he was young and wanted players to be able to do the same.

The shareware build was left out of that. In the source code id later published, starting the shareware game with the -file switch to add a custom WAD stops it with "You cannot -file with the shareware version. Register!" The registered build runs its own check: it looks for a list of 23 lump names that only the full game has, the maps of episodes two and three plus sprites such as the Cyberdemon's, and quits with "This is not the registered version." when one is missing. Anyone who wanted the levels fans were making had to buy the full game.

Jeff Bird is credited with the first custom WAD, Origwad, on March 7, 1994, under three months after the shareware upload. id released the engine's source code on December 23, 1997, under a restrictive license, and re-released it under the GNU GPL on October 3, 1999. That code is the DOOM Open Source Release on GitHub. It still lists doom1.wad as the file that marks the shareware game.

The deal with the Taiwan pirates

At QuakeCon 2026, Romero said id knew pirates in Taiwan were copying Doom. His words were "We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it, 100 percent." He said id contacted the biggest of them and offered its own boxed stock at a discount. The point, he said, was that what they sold would be legitimate.

Romero never described the deal as a license to make copies. He gave a commercial reason: id made its money when players ordered the rest of the game, and "distribution is king." He also said that if people want to copy a game, they will copy it.

Romero called the event the first time all four id founders had been together since 1993.

Romero argued in a separate exchange that Doom's shareware players were not pirates by default and that the history is messier than "pirates killed the companies." A huge number of them, he said, were playing the free episode exactly as intended.

How to play the shareware episode today

The quickest route is the Internet Archive's copy. It runs in the browser through a DOSBox emulator, with DOOM.EXE as the start file. The item also holds shareware builds from v1.1 (1993) through v1.9 (1995), each with an installer, plus a DOSBox drive image.

For the full game on current hardware, the DOOM + DOOM II re-release on Steam was listed at €9.99 when I checked on October 23, 2026. Its minimum requirement is 64-bit Windows 10. That version includes the original DOS versions of Doom and Doom II, add-on episodes such as Sigil, a new 16-map episode called Legacy of Rust, and an in-game browser for community mods. The game also came to Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Android in 2019. The consoles got the expanded port alongside Doom II in 2024.

Questions people ask

What is the shareware version of Doom?

It is the first episode, "Knee-Deep in the Dead," released free on December 10, 1993 and meant to be copied. Its data sits in a file called DOOM1.WAD, which cannot load custom WADs; the registered game adds the other two episodes.

Is Doom a sinful game?

Some critics said so at the time. The game drew criticism for graphic violence and satanic imagery, and the critic David Grossman called it a "mass murder simulator." Germany classified it as harmful to minors shortly after release and rescinded that rating in 2011.

Is the creator of Doom a Mormon?

The designer people usually mean is Sandy Petersen, who says he made 20 of Doom's levels. He grew up Mormon and told Shacknews he has "no problem depicting demons, partly because that's not what Mormons think demons look like anyway."

Was Doom made in C or C++?

C. The game was written largely in C with some assembly, on NeXT computers.

Where can I download the Doom shareware WAD?

The Internet Archive hosts the shareware episode in several versions and lets you play it in a browser. The Steam re-release is the paid option for modern systems.