RIP - Creative Founder Sim Wong Hoo, the Man Behind Sound Blaster

upstart writes:

He founded Creative in 1981 and ran it ever since:

Creative Technologies founder, CEO and chairman Sim Wong Hoo has died, his company has confirmed. He "passed away peacefully on 4 January 2023," according to a press release. He was 67 years old.

It might seem hard for younger readers to believe, but there was a time that computer sound wasn't guaranteed. If you wanted to plug in headphones or speakers that could do more than bloops or bleeps, you probably needed a sound card - and none were as successful as Creative Labs' Sound Blaster. It sold over 400 million units as of its 30th anniversary in 2019.

In the pre-Windows 95 / DirectX era, few words in PC gaming were as important as the phrase "Sound Blaster compatible," allowing players to hear the dogs bark in Wolfenstein 3D, or mess around with the synthesized voice in Creative's Dr. Sbaitso demo (you can play it on the web these days).

The company was also huge in the MP3 player space with its Creative Nomad and Zen line of players and successfully sued Apple over its iPod, obtaining a $100 million settlement.

Success wasn't immediate. Originally, Sim set out to build an entire computer that could talk, according to 1993 and 1994 profiles of the man at Bloombergand The New York Times. He founded Creative Technologies in Singapore in 1981, and yet by 1986 - two years after Steve Jobs let the Macintosh "speak for itself" - the company's PCs had sold so poorly that he was reportedly down to just a handful of engineers.

But when they took the Cubic CT's music board to a computer exhibit in the United States, the company found its footing. "The money we made on a few hundred boards was the equivalent to the money we made on the PC," he told the NYT.

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