RETRO TECH / ANALYSIS
featured a stereo 12-voice music synthesiser. This product
became quite a hit in Asia. It was our first highly lucrative
product, and back then, that meant a lot for a small company
suchas Creative.
In1988, I felt the time was right for me to go to the USA,
which was the world’s largest PC market at the time, and my
mission was to create a PC sound standard for the whole
world. A lot of people felt this was an impossible mission,
considering our small size and limited resources at the time.
WhileI was in the USA, I learned that the market for music
cardshad started to gain traction in the gaming industry.
We quickly approached key game developers to support our
music cards. As an unknown company from Asia, it was very
challenging initially. However, we soon gained the respect of
several key developers, becauseofourprowessintechnology
and commitment to
supporting these developers.
To target this gaming market,
we changed the name of our
music card to Game Blaster
and dropped the price by half.
In the process of talking to
these developers, they
strongly requested a sound
card that could support voice. I
told them that we had already done it in 1986, but removed the
feature due to lack of support for it. I told them that if they were
willing to support it, we could do a joint development. The first
company with which we worked closely was Broderbund, with
its Carmen Sandiego series of educational games. The project
name of this sound card was ‘Killer Card’. Broderbund
developed its new voice-capable games with a crude
prototype version of our ‘Killer Card’. This card actually consists
of two prototype boards, interlinked together with a whole
bunch of wires.
The ‘Killer Card’ became the Sound Blaster, and it was
launched in November 1989 at Comdex in Las Vegas. And with
the voice-capable games from Broderbund ready to ship,
Sound Blaster was ready for prime time. Michael Jackson
passed by and was attracted to the only booth that generated
computer audio throughout the entire Comdex show – theCPC: Let’s start right at the beginning. What made you think
there was a definite market for a discrete sound card in
the 1980s?
Sim Wong Hoo: Let me go a little bit further back. I started
playing with microcomputers in 1979, when there was only a
handful of them around. They were either dumb or only
managed some beeps. At that time, I was designing some
computerised seismic data logging equipment, which my
former French boss claimed to be the most advanced in the
world. When the equipment was brought to operate in oil rigs,
nobody believed that it was possible that a Singaporean had
designed this equipment in Singapore, which had no high-tech
industry at all.
With a strong background in digital and analogue
technologies, plus acoustic knowledge, coupled with a deep
interest in the science of music, I had a burning desire to bring
sound into the computer world. In fact, my first secret
microcomputer project in the my French boss’ company was
writing an electronic organ program in machine language that
could be played on the computer keyboard, much to the
chagrin of my boss. I left his company and started Creative in
1981 with a mission – to bring sound into the computer world.
It took Creative another five years, until 1986,
before we developed a PC – the Cubic CT – that had
sound and music capabilities. This was five years
before the term ‘multimedia’ for PC was even coined. But we
were too early, as there wasn’t any third-party content to
support it, especially voice-capable
software. Creative faced a Herculean task
in marketing the Cubic CT, especially in a
tiny market such as Singapore.
In 1987, after some soul-searching,
we decided that the Cubic CT was too
complex an animal for a tiny startup in
Singapore to handle. We decided to focus
our energies on just the music portion of
the Cubic CT, for which we had developed
some cool software, such as the Intelligent
Organ in 1986, which enabled you to play
orchestra-like music with just one finger
tapping on the keyboard. This became our
Creative Music System music card, which
MY MISSION WAS
TO CREATE A PC
SOUND STANDARD
FOR THE WHOLEWORLD
f b p s w m w c W c mThe later Sound Blaster 2 increased the playback
sampling rate to 44KHz, still on an 8-bit ISA card
The Sound Blaster
Pro added an IDE
interface, enabling
Creative to sell
multimedia packs
with a sound card
and CD-ROM drive