A Sound Blaster Eulogy Bobby Prince taught a Sound Blaster to have a soul

Bobby Prince died June 16, at 81. Real name Robert Caskin Prince III – Vietnam vet, lawyer, and for one glorious accidental decade, the guy who invented what a PC game was supposed to sound like.

I didn’t grow up with him exactly – I grew up with Duke Nukem 3D’s strip-club synth-rock, Doom’s MIDI metal grinding through a Sound Blaster, and Duke Nukem 2’s weirdly chill loops nobody else seems to remember. That music didn’t just soundtrack my teenage years. It’s still in rotation on my machine right now, three decades later.

Library of Congress inducted the Doom score into the National Recording Registry in May. A month later, he was gone. Rest easy, Bobby – the frequencies you split so the effects could cut through the music still cut through.