Taiwan Gamers' Wildest Moments: Chasing Delivery Trucks, Mobbing Beitou, Lifting the Cup in LA

On an island of 23 million people, every few years something game-related sends Taiwan into collective frenzy. In 2012, players rode scooters at 3 a.m. chasing convenience store delivery trucks for Diablo 3; that autumn, seven young people averaging 21 years old lifted the League of Legends World Championship trophy in Los Angeles. In 2016, Pokémon GO drove crowds in Beitou Park onto the pages of TIME magazine. In 2020, the hands that had been scrambling for masks pivoted to scrambling for Switches, then PS5s — for two straight years. Taken individually, each of these was a news event. Taken together, they trace a recurring line: when this island plays seriously, the intensity makes the whole world take notice.

3 a.m.: Chasing That Truck

May 15, 2012. Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo III launched globally. Twelve years had passed since the previous installment. Global pre-orders numbered in the millions; first-week sales broke 6.3 million units, shattering all previous PC game records.¹

In Taiwan, the story unfolded in a way no other place on earth could replicate.

Digital copies required a credit card, which many players didn't have. Physical copies were distributed through 7-Eleven and FamilyMart convenience stores, but each store received only a handful of copies. So an unprecedented behavior emerged: players started tracking convenience store delivery trucks.²

At 3 a.m., some rode scooters along the delivery routes following the trucks. Others walked several blocks on foot, asking store after store: "Has Diablo arrived yet?" Some calculated the delivery schedule and reported in real time on Mobile01 and PTT: "Nangang 7-11 has it — two copies left." "Neihu FamilyMart hasn't gotten theirs yet; the truck's heading east."³

The scrolling ticker at Shih Hsin University reportedly flashed: "Didn't get D3? Come on in."⁴

That week, Taiwan sold an estimated 200,000 copies. Convenience store game racks were cleared out within minutes of stocking. A middle-of-the-night delivery truck chase became one of the most absurd and passionate collective memories in Taiwan gaming history.

Curator's Note
Chasing delivery trucks could only happen in Taiwan. Three conditions combined: an extreme density of convenience stores (more than one per square kilometer), a unique distribution model where physical game discs were sold through convenience stores, and a group of players willing to ride scooters through cold predawn air to chase a cargo truck. No other place on earth had all three conditions at once.

That Autumn Night in Los Angeles

October 13, 2012. Los Angeles, USA.

Seven young people from Taiwan, averaging 21 years old, walked onto the stage of the League of Legends Season 2 World Championship finals. Their team name: Taipei Assassins (TPA) — Taiwan's first professional League of Legends team. They had entered the sixteen-team bracket seeded near the bottom, and almost no one gave them a chance.⁵

Their opponent was Korea's Azubu Frost, widely considered the pre-tournament favorite.

TPA won 3–1. Prize money: $1 million USD, approximately NT$30 million.⁶

That night, huge numbers of Taiwanese viewers watched the live stream; the internet buckled at points. TPA's Facebook fan page accumulated an enormous surge of likes after the match. The team returned to a late-night welcome at Taoyuan Airport, where hundreds of fans and media had gathered.⁷

Captain MiSTakE (Chen Hui-chung), 22, started playing online games in elementary school and took a leave of absence from college for esports. Mid-lane player Toyz (Liu Wei-jian), from Hong Kong, later opened a drink shop in Taiwan called "Jian Yin Tea House." Before the championship, these people's lives had zero overlap with the phrase "professional athlete." (From Udn Times feature report)⁸

In 2016, TPA was acquired by Jay Chou and renamed "J Team."⁹ The roster was long gone, but the weight of "Taipei Assassins" in Taiwanese esports history is something no team since has displaced. That victory loosened the definition of "playing video games" in Taiwanese society by one degree — nudging it from "wasting time" toward "maybe this can be a profession."

The Apocalypse in Beitou Park

August 6, 2016. Pokémon GO launched in Taiwan.

Four days later, someone discovered that Beitou Park was a "nest" for rare Pokémon. Snorlax — a character almost impossible to find elsewhere — appeared frequently in the park. The news detonated across social media.¹⁰

For the next two weeks, the nighttime crowds at Beitou Park rivaled New Year's Eve.

Someone photographed the scene: thousands of people simultaneously holding up their phones, standing on the park paths, the grass, the road — then suddenly someone shouted "Snorlax over there!" and the entire mass of people sprinted in the same direction. Cars were paralyzed. Motorcyclists dismounted to join the run.¹¹

TIME magazine ran a piece headlined "Pokémon Might Be What a Post-Apocalyptic World Looks Like," illustrated with a photo from Beitou Park — a road completely packed with people, heads down, every single one staring at a phone.¹²

The Beitou Police Precinct issued a wave of illegal parking fines in mid-to-late August.¹³ Nearby residents protested noise and trash; the local neighborhood chief demanded that Niantic remove the Pokémon from Beitou Park. Two months later the craze subsided, and Beitou returned to quiet. But the images from those two weeks became some of the most iconic footage from the global Pokémon GO fever era.

2020: Done Grabbing Masks, Now Grabbing Switches

March 20, 2020. Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched globally. The world was locking down; Taiwan was scrambling for masks.

The timing was almost cruelly perfect: a game that lets you grow flowers, fish, and visit friends on a virtual island collided with an era when people were forced to keep their distance from everyone in real life. Animal Crossing became the most-searched item on Shopee, second only to masks and surpassing toilet paper.¹⁴

The problem was you couldn't buy a console.

Switch was manufactured in China; the pandemic had broken the supply chain. Taiwan's Animal Crossing special edition console sold out in pre-orders instantly; regular editions also disappeared. Secondhand prices were marked up to double the retail price, with scalping rampant on Shopee and Facebook groups. Switch Lite sales spiked nearly four times, because many people simply couldn't find the regular version and settled for the next best thing.¹⁵

"The safest social activity during the pandemic" became Animal Crossing's unofficial tagline. You couldn't see friends in person, but you could visit their island and admire the flowers they'd planted. During that period, Taiwanese social media was split: half discussing the Central Epidemic Command Center press conferences, half trading turnip prices.

PS5: Two Years of Not Getting a Console

September 18, 2020, noon. Sony PS5 pre-orders opened in Taiwan. PChome, Momo, Books.com.tw, and Bahamut Shop went on sale simultaneously.

Under one minute. Completely sold out.¹⁶

PChome's page started spinning at exactly noon, then before it had finished loading it said "Sold Out." Momo's pre-order page skipped straight past "Add to Cart" and landed directly on "Out of Stock." One player posted on Bahamut in despair: "Pre-ordered three times. Each time sold out in one second. Are actual humans even buying these?"¹⁷

The answer: a lot of them weren't.

Scalpers used automated scripts, opened masses of accounts, and used different IPs to circumvent each platform's anti-bot mechanisms. One front-end engineer reverse-engineered e-commerce platforms' purchase flows and posted the vulnerabilities as a technical article on PTT. The PS5 scramble transformed from "players vs. retailer" into a three-way technical arms race: "players vs. scalpers vs. platform engineers."¹⁸

The war lasted two full years. From 2020 through 2022, every restock followed the same script: announcement, countdown, sold out in seconds, wailing, wait for the next wave. Taiwanese players developed a complete "PS5 acquisition guide": open multiple browsers, pre-log into all platforms, set alarms precise to the second, don't hesitate at the moment of purchase — go straight to checkout.

Point of Debate
The PS5 scramble exposed a structural weakness in Taiwan's e-commerce platforms when it comes to fair sales of limited-quantity products. Platforms have no incentive to block scalpers (selling to anyone is revenue either way), scalpers operate legally (reselling at a markup isn't illegal), and the only victims are ordinary people who want to buy a console at retail price to play games. As of 2026, this structural problem remains unsolved.

Density Amplifies Intensity

Chasing delivery trucks. Lifting the cup in LA. Mobbing Beitou. Scrambling for Switch. Scrambling for PS5. Five events across ten years. Each frenzy took a different form — but underneath them all is a shared amplifier: Taiwan's density.

23 million people squeezed onto 36,000 square kilometers. The world's second-highest convenience store density. Internet penetration above 90%. When a gaming event occurs, the speed of information spread, the speed of crowd assembly, and the emotional resonance are all magnified by the island's physical conditions.

Diablo 3's delivery trucks could be tracked because from your home you could scooter to the nearest three convenience stores in five minutes. Beitou Park could fill with thousands of people in four days because MRT Xin-Beitou Station is right there. TPA's victory could become a national topic within hours because Taiwan's social platforms (PTT, Bahamut) are concentrated enough that one message could reach hundreds of thousands of people in a single night. The PS5 scramble turned into a technical war because Taiwan's e-commerce infrastructure made "completing a purchase in one second" technically feasible.

Did you know?
Of Diablo III's 6.3 million first-week copies sold globally, Taiwan accounted for over 200,000. Measured by population, Taiwan's purchase density was several times the global average.

The Next Delivery Truck

Riding scooters at 3 a.m. to chase a truck turned into racing a bot on an e-commerce platform at noon. Physical pursuit on the street became a millisecond war on screen. The form keeps changing, but the underlying drive hasn't. On this island, there is a group of people willing to spend disproportionate amounts of time, energy, and gloriously stupid passion for a single game.

The people who chased that delivery truck in 2012 are in their mid-thirties now. They have families, jobs, and they're asleep at 3 a.m. But the next time news breaks about a limited-quantity game release at a convenience store, some of them will put down their phone, stare at the ceiling in silence for a few seconds, and remember that night — riding a scooter into the cold wind, chasing a white cargo truck.

The truck drove off long ago. But the people who gave chase remember which way the wind was blowing.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Gaming Industry and Digital Entertainment — The full panorama of Taiwanese gaming, from distribution to original development
• Taiwan Convenience Store Culture — The prerequisite for chasing delivery trucks: the world's second-densest convenience store network
• History of Taiwan's Online Community Migration — The information infrastructure behind these moments of collective frenzy
• Softstar's Twin Classics — The emotional coming-of-age for Taiwan's gamers, one generation earlier
• Into the Dungeon: Bahamut's Story — The community platform stage on which these wild moments played out

References