The Fall of Creative Labs

Every PC gamer as old as me probably still remembers the days of the 386 and the 486 - that is, the 80386 and 80486 Intel processors. The Intel Pentium chip would soon make its debut and revolutionize the PC industry. At this time, computer gaming was a budding hobby and about to enter its prime. Doom was released during this time, and Wolfenstein 3D was a game of recent memory. It wouldn't take long until cookie cutter copies of these games were created. The economy was certainly better than it is now, and technology was very much a booming field. Microsoft was still growing, and IBM, enjoying a decade or so of domination in the PC market, after licensing PCs to be developed by other companies, would soon be swallowed by Bill Gates' empire.

During these medieval times of the PC, there were wars between audio card companies, such as Aureal, Creative, Media Vision. There were wars not only in audio hardware but software. The competition was able to breed a lot of innovations that bring the PC to where it is today, for better or worse. If you created an inferior, difficult to use product, you and your company would die with history, but if you created a superior, user-friendly, compatible, headache free, non-ass hurting product, then you were in line to maybe conquer your competition.

As a kid I tired of the computer bleeps and tones of the PC speaker on my Dad's old 386, so I coaxed him to buy me a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum, a sound card capable of creating digital sound. This was a big deal, because before these cards were made, PCs simply went: "BEEP" and "ERRRP." But to achieve this digital sound, you were forced to manually and incessantly fiddle with your computer and do things such as calculate the square derivative of the speed of light and its effects on the protons and electrons of the elements silicon, iron, silver, and oxygen, and how it thereby causes a chain reaction that induces you to become pissed off at your computer, thereby impelling you to chuck the damn thing out the window.

So, on my 15th birthday, I coerced my parents into getting me a Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 to replace this troublesome Pro Audio Spectrum. For $279.00, this card, for its time, was an absolute beast. It featured Q-Sound (the first card ever to feature three-dimensional sound), a MIDI synthesizer capable of producing fairly realistic emulations of orchestral instruments (today most sound cards and on-board sound are capable of this), and sound quality that rivaled compact discs (CDs). The best part about the sound card was that, despite PCs' clumsy, user-enemy (as opposed to user-friendly) way of scaring off the average consumer, it was compatible and easy to configure. I told myself that I would forever be a fan of Creative Labs until its demise. Henceforth, all sound card purchases for the next decade were all Creative purchases.

All those purchases resulted in some sort of complication or other; calls to tech support, compatibility issues, crashes to the desktop while gaming, infamous blue screens of death (BSODs). My most recent sound card, purchased way back in 2003, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value, has been the most frustrating of my purchases. The card survived up until just last week, where I've tried to be as patient with it as possible, forgiving it for crashing while trying to run Mass Effect, purchasing the $10 ALchemy upgrade from Creative (they later made it available for free due to customer complaints), and constant crackling and rattling in Fallout 3. I've finally abandoned my love affair with Creative and purchased an Auzentech Forte, which appears to be far superior to any sound card I have purchased in recent memory. Though it still uses Creative technology, the actual card is not designed by Creative.

Where did Creative ever go wrong? A combination of stagnating customer satisfaction, poor driver support, brazen claims of prioritizing profit over the customer, and now - the destruction of EAX, Creative's three-dimensional audio. Microsoft, the giant that it is today, became as such by using its dominance in the operating system market to destroy its competition. Since nearly everyone uses Windows, Microsoft has taken advantage of this by preventing EAX to be used in both Vista and Windows 7. And now it seeks to replace EAX with its own proprietary XAudio 2, used in XBox 360 systems. Since EAX only works through Creative's ALchemy (which, by the way, is easy but shoddy way to get EAX to work under Vista and Windows 7), most PC game developers do not even bother to use EAX, or have come up with their own software audio solutions, like surround sound, or even simply relying on stereo. This is sad, because EAX is a very powerful, entertaining, and revolutionary sound technology, but is being destroyed - just like all of Microsoft's competitors in decades past.

Creative still makes powerful, high quality cards, and I am still a big believer in EAX technology. But the days of total dominance are over for them, and though Creative may have shot itself in the foot and at times forsaken its customers, Microsoft seeks to destroy Creative as it has destroyed other companies. In the end, the consumer is the one that suffers, because good innovations are lost, all because of the profit politics of the PC industry.