Thomas Burton was fourteen in 1993 when he finally saved enough from his paper round to buy Doom. Six months of saving. Six months of reading about it in PC Zone, seeing screenshots, hearing his mates at school describe the shotgun’s roar and the demons’ screams. He knew every level from magazines before he’d played a single one.
Installation took twenty minutes. Configuration took three hours. Getting the sound to work took until 2am, when his father, furious at the ongoing noise from Thomas’s bedroom, threatened to put the entire computer in the dustbin.
“I had an AdLib Gold card,” Thomas tells me now, thirty-two years later, still embarrassed by the memory. “On paper, it was better than a Sound Blaster. Better synthesis, better audio quality, cost fifty quid more. But Doom just… wouldn’t work with it. I tried every configuration, every IRQ setting, every DMA channel combination. Nothing. The game would start, but there’d be no sound. Just silence.”
He eventually borrowed a friend’s Sound Blaster 16 for the weekend. Doom detected it automatically, configured itself, and within five minutes Thomas was blasting imps and hearing the sounds that had haunted his imagination for half a year.
“The Sound Blaster wasn’t better,” he says quietly. “But it worked. And in that moment, that was all that mattered.”
Between 1989 and 1997, PC gaming audio was a battlefield littered with technically superior products that nobody used. AdLib, Roland, Gravis, Media Vision: all offered cards that produced better sound than Creative Labs’ Sound Blaster series. All failed spectacularly.
This is the story of how Creative Labs won the audio wars not through technical excellence, but by understanding something their competitors didn’t. Reliability beats quality. Compatibility beats everything.
The Compatibility Nightmare: What It Actually Felt Like
Before diving into business strategy, we need to remember the sheer, visceral pain of PC audio in the early 1990s. It was a genuine nightmare, a rite of passage for any self-respecting PC gamer. You didn’t just install a game; you wrestled it into submission.
Remember this checklist of horrors?
- IRQ conflicts: The dreaded Interrupt Request Line. Get it wrong, and your whole system would crash. Your sound card, your mouse, your network card: all screaming for attention from the CPU, and only one could have IRQ 5.
- DMA channels: Direct Memory Access. Another number to get right in a command line, another opportunity for a system-halting conflict.
- AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS: Your PC’s sacred texts. A single wrong line in these DOS startup files, and you’d spend your weekend staring at a blinking cursor, wondering where it all went wrong.
- Physical jumpers: Tiny plastic and metal connectors on the sound card itself. You’d have to open your PC, pull out the card, and manually move a jumper to change a setting, all based on a diagram in a manual you’d probably lost.
Graham Williams, a former tech support columnist for PC Gamer magazine, remembers the desperation well. “The letters weren’t asking ‘how do I make this sound better?’ They were asking ‘how do I make this produce any sound at all?’ That desperation, that sense of being locked out of experiences: that’s what Creative Labs solved.”
Technical Excellence Doesn’t Mean Market Success
Let’s be honest: for a long time, Sound Blaster cards weren’t the best. They were just good enough. The competition was, on paper, far more impressive.
- AdLib Gold: Released in 1992 as the successor to the original AdLib card. It offered superior FM synthesis and better audio quality than the Sound Blaster Pro.
- Roland MT-32/LAPC-I: These were actual synthesisers on a card, with 32 PCM samples and multi-timbral output. They were the gold standard for game soundtracks between 1988 and 1992. Composers at Sierra and LucasArts wrote specifically for their warm, realistic tones.
- Gravis Ultrasound: Released in 1992, it was the king of the demo scene. It used wavetable synthesis years before Sound Blaster adopted it, offering far more realistic and complex sounds.
- Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum: It matched the Sound Blaster feature for feature, but with better audio quality, lower noise floors, and a more robust design.
So why did they all fail? Creative Labs made three ruthlessly effective strategic decisions that their competitors either ignored or couldn’t match.
First, they offered backward compatibility with the original AdLib standard, ensuring baseline support across hundreds of existing games. Second, they priced aggressively, undercutting rivals by £30 to £50. Third, and most importantly, they understood that the key to the market wasn’t the consumer. It was the developer.
The Developer Lock-In Strategy
Creative Labs didn’t just sell sound cards. They sold a platform. If they could make the Sound Blaster the easiest, most predictable, and most widely available audio target for game developers, the rest of the market would follow.
Mark Miller, a former game audio programmer at Origin Systems, remembers the calculation. “We’d get Roland MT-32s from Roland, free, and they sounded gorgeous. But we knew maybe 5% of players had them. Sound Blaster? Maybe 60 to 70% by 1993. You support Sound Blaster first, everything else is a bonus if you have time. Which you don’t.”
Creative Labs achieved this through three tactics. First, they flooded game studios with free Sound Blaster cards. Second, their developer kits were comprehensive and, crucially, understandable. Third, they assigned engineers to help developers solve audio problems directly.
This created a self-reinforcing cycle. Games shipped with “Sound Blaster compatible” on the box. Players bought Sound Blasters to play those games. Developers, seeing the growing market share, targeted the Sound Blaster in their next title. Competing cards were forced to offer “Sound Blaster compatibility,” a feature that rarely worked as well as the real thing.
Creative Labs didn’t just rely on market forces. They actively maintained their dominance through proprietary extensions to the Sound Blaster standard, licensed exclusively to select developers. Even if a competing card claimed “Sound Blaster compatibility,” it might not support all the features of the latest Sound Blaster model. The magazines of the time amplified this. PC Gamer and PC Zone focused their reviews and buyer’s guides on Sound Blaster compatibility, effectively making it the only sensible choice for serious gamers.
The pattern repeats today. Meta’s Quest headsets dominate VR not through superior power, but through their library of games. The platform, not the hardware, is the product.
The Human Cost: Who Got Left Behind
The triumph of the Sound Blaster wasn’t a victory for everyone. For those who couldn’t afford the £80 to £150 price tag in the early 1990s, the dominance of a single proprietary standard meant exclusion.
Claire Morrison grew up on a council estate in Glasgow. She played Doom in 1994, but without sound. “It felt incomplete,” she tells me. “Like I was experiencing a degraded version of something everyone else took for granted. That feeling: that’s exclusion. That’s a technology divide.”
Her PC speaker could manage bleeps for the menu. The shotgun roar, the demon screams, the atmospheric music that made Doom terrifying: those were locked behind a paywall she couldn’t breach. For every story of glorious new technology, there’s someone on the other side of the divide, unable to participate.
Preservation and Legacy
Today, the sound card wars are a distant memory. Onboard audio is standard. We take for granted that our games will just work. But for a dedicated community of preservationists, the battle to keep these old cards alive is very real.
Sarah Jenkins runs a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting vintage PC audio hardware. “I’m racing against time,” she tells me. “Capacitors leak. Chips fail. The people who actually configured these systems in real time are ageing. In ten years, the embodied knowledge will be gone.”
Her archive includes photos, specifications, compatibility notes, and crucially, video demonstrations of installation procedures. Emulators like DOSBox recreate the Sound Blaster experience admirably, but they can’t capture the tactile reality. The frustration of moving physical jumpers. The triumph when the configuration finally worked. Those memories are hardware-specific, and the hardware is dying.
The Patterns Repeat
The Sound Blaster story is more than tech nostalgia. It’s a case study in how markets are won and lost. “Good enough” and “works everywhere” beat technical brilliance. Platform momentum, developer support, and ruthless strategy create dominance that lasts decades.
We see the same patterns today. HDR standards. Spatial audio formats. Console ecosystems with their walled gardens. The lesson remains: the best technology doesn’t always win. The platform with the most momentum, the most support, and the most effective strategy does.
The ghosts of the audio wars still haunt us, reminding us that for every winner, countless superior products failed simply because they lacked the right approach.
So the next time you fire up a game and the sound just works, remember the fallen soldiers of the audio wars. Remember the AdLib Golds, the Roland MT-32s, the Gravis Ultrasounds. Superior technologies, all of them, defeated not by engineering but by strategy.
And spare a thought for the fourteen-year-old you. Sitting in a darkened room at 2am, surrounded by manuals and floppy disks, just trying to hear the roar of a shotgun.
It didn’t sound better. But it worked. And that was everything.
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