George Eric Engstrom

Eric Engstrom, a former Microsoft leader and prolific entrepreneur, died on the morning of December 1st, 2020, at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family and a few close friends.

The cause was organ failure, his family said.

Eric rose to prominence helping to create the DirectX platform for Windows 95, which made it possible for computer programmers to create rich, sophisticated graphical games that could run on Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. DirectX was a quantum improvement over the low-level graphical programming required to build MS-DOS games, and it became the basis for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console first released in 2001.

Eric served two tours at Microsoft in the 1990s and the 2000s and started many companies to pursue his myriad ideas for how to make the world better. Intertwined with his commercial projects he was always inventing, exploring, and learning. He bought a small plane intending to learn how to fly. He bought a small farm outside of Seattle (“Egostoke”) where he tinkered with an improved internal combustion engine, a motorcycling safety device, and prototypes for many of his companies.

Friends and colleagues experienced Eric as a “force of nature” and “larger than life.” He had an intense ability to focus, and if he was focused on you, you felt the sheer weight of his intellect and energy. It was hard to say no to Eric Engstrom! He was constantly curious, and he just knew that anything that already existed could be improved, and that there were vast numbers of products and services still to be imagined. Eric’s favorite question was: “How hard can it be […to invent cold fusion, cure cancer, extend life, go to Mars…]?”

Eric imagined himself as a real-world version of the comic book superhero Iron Man/Tony Stark, the industrialist, genius inventor and CEO of Stark Industries. Not because of ego or vanity, but because he was confident he could find a better way. He believed “Engstrom logic” could cut through the noise and craft solutions because he wasn’t hindered by the “way things were always done.”

George Eric Engstrom was born on January 25, 1965 in Oroville, Washington, to Vivian Joy Freeby Engstrom and George Ernest Engstrom. Settlers came to the area in the 1850s and renamed it “Oroville” in 1892 to attract prospectors and merchants to the surrounding gold mines (“oro” is the Spanish word for gold).

In his teens, Eric and his friend Swain Porter spent a few weeks prospecting for gold on Porter family mining claims along the Similkameen River near Oroville. They practiced shooting guns in the evenings, told stories around the campfire, and slept in hammocks slung next to their mine. After two weeks they moved on to other things, but Eric continued “prospecting his way through life”: a car wash, a consumer Linux mobile operating system, the “banana” phone, beauty wand, cold fusion with carbon nanotubes, wild health experiments, and more.

Eric “caught the space bug” from watching the Star Trek TV series. As a 4-year old, Eric recalls dressing up in “home-made moon shoes, a Halloween space suit, and a Lost-in-Space space helmet” to watch the televised Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969.

Porter recalls Eric in Kindergarten: “He pulled out the large building blocks, but instead of making a fort or house like other kids, he made a small tower, climbed on top of it, said he was going to the moon, and as we all watched, he counted loudly backwards from 100, shouted “BLASTOFF” and jumped off. He had a way of making you believe something amazing was going to happen and sometimes it did.”

When Eric was 10, he decided that he would be the first person to go to Mars. So, he decided to build a computer to control his (unbuilt) spaceship. It took him a year to assemble the parts and get his computer working, and all it was able to do was display a blocky still image of the Starship Enterprise on a TV. As an adult, he still wanted to go to Mars, and he would often say that was why he was working so hard on his current company to make a lot of money.

Eric’s father owned a small variety store, and when Eric was 6, his father turned it into a Western store, selling boots, saddles, and other tack to the local farmers. Eric eventually worked in his father’s store for a time, but he said, “people are unpredictable to me”, so working with customers in the store was very hard for him.

When Eric was 16, he started writing software, mostly small toy programs. He worked as a software engineer for a guy in nearby Omak for 3 years, and then moved on to Washington State University. He only took a few classes his first term, and his remaining four years in Pullman was primarily a social experience.

In 1988, Eric interviewed for a temporary job at Microsoft. Hired for a month, he was presented with 300 letters from customers who were having problems with the Microsoft FORTRAN compiler. Despite only knowing the C programming language, he learned enough FORTRAN to answer all those letters.

Microsoft offered Eric a full-time job, but the company Data I/O offered him $2,000 more in annual salary. Microsoft also offered him options to buy 2,000 shares of Microsoft stock, but Eric thought stock options were “something they do to people [from the country] to confuse them about cash.” It was the first time Eric lost $10M, but unfortunately not the last.

After a few years at Data I/O and Zortech, Eric was hired as a Software Evangelist at Microsoft in 1991, with the aim of encouraging independent software vendors to focus on the Microsoft operating systems (MS-DOS and Windows). Eric was especially proud of helping programmer tools companies target Windows rather than IBM’s competitor OS/2.

In 1994, Alex St. John and Craig Eisler recruited Eric to be the program manager on their Computer Game Software Development Kit project. Without the approval of their managers, Eric, St. John, and Eisler expanded their mandate to build a full-blown computer gaming subsystem for Windows: “The Manhattan Project”, named for the WWII-era atomic bomb project. Eric chose the name because Microsoft was waging a war for computer gaming dominance, Japan was the center of computer game development at the time, and it was a big technical gamble with an impossibly short deadline.

After proving their software worked, Microsoft renamed it DirectX and launched it in September 1995. DirectX achieved over 90% market share among computer game software developers within 18 months of launch.

Eric, St. John, and Eisler were dubbed “The Beastie Boys” (THE rap rock group) for their loud, in your face, take-no-prisoners approach to software development. Their unorthodox approach ruffled a lot of feathers within Microsoft and they came close to being fired for their rough “human interface”. Their story is captured exuberantly in the

1999 book “Renegades of the Empire” by Michael Drummond.

After DirectX, Eric’s effort to build a multimedia web browser (“ChromeEffects”) failed, but he was the best Microsoft witnesses in the United States Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft in 1999. Despite his stellar performance on the witness stand, Microsoft lost the case.

After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he started Catalytic Software with his childhood friend Porter, providing outsourced software engineering from India. Dismayed by the poor living conditions, Catalytic decided to build New Oroville: a 500 acre “company town” near Hyderabad complete with novel domed homes for its employees, high speed internet access, shops, parks, and more. Before these grand plans could be fully realized, the global financial crisis hit India, and Catalytic engineered an exit in 2010. The beautiful 50 acre campus that Catalytic created remains an attraction in Hyderabad today.

Eric started Wildseed in 2001 to build mobile phones with replaceable sleeves that gave the underlying phone a distinctive appearance and personality: a teenager could buy a Smart Skin™ sleeve with their favorite pop singer, sports hero, or computer game. AOL bought Wildseed in 2005, and Eric spent several years improving and expanding AOL mobile phone software and services.

Eric met the love of his life Cindy Smith at Wildseed, where she was Vice President of Marketing. They were married on Groundhog Day 2005, a date they chose to make it easy for Eric to remember. Naturally, he forgot their anniversary the next year.

Eric and Cindy started a family immediately, and Eric was relentlessly devoted to Cindy and their four children. He took up Shaolin Kung Fu with his children, constructed elaborate Halloween costumes with them, and indulged their many diverse interests with the passion of a mad scientist. Eric was so proud of his family.

Eric’s children called him “Disney Dad.” He was adamant about the annual family trip to Disneyland or Disneyworld. He would stay out until the kids cried for mercy. He would ride the same ride over and over again. He could maneuver a stroller through a crowd like a hot knife through butter. He loved Disney. His children loved Disney.

After leaving Microsoft (for the second time) in 2013, he helped start the companies ESL air and bevRAGE, and with Cindy he co-founded Sircle Ventures and Solomomo. The Engstrom family moved to Puerto Rico a few years ago for a change of pace, and recently moved back to the Seattle area.

In 2003, Laura Schildkraut of the University of Washington, summed up her hour-long interview with Eric by sharing these quotes from his colleagues: “Eric is absolutely fearless; he is infinitely creative. Always thinking outside the box. He has ruthless focus, immense drive, and turn-it-upside-down genius. In terms of management style, he’s hands off if you’re doing your job, and hands and elbows stuffed deep into your gut if you’re not. His best quote is “I’d better not be better at your job than you are.” He inspires either phenomenal loyalty or phenomenal fear, and he uses both well. Looking toward the future, whatever Eric tries it will be something big and outrageous. The only real certainty is that he will be better and wiser than he is today. That is a fundamental Eric characteristic. I expect he will be rich, but he could also be broke. Either will make him better.”

Eric is survived by his wife Cindy and their children Steffi, Bridget, Jack, and Vivian of Redmond, and his sister Kathy Halvorsen of Omak.

Once SARS2 vaccines are widely available, a proper Viking celebration of Eric’s life will be organized.

P.S. The Wall Street Journal published an obituary of Eric by James R. Hagerty on 12/9/2020. It is behind the WSJ paywall at https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-misfit-helped-lead-company-into-game-market-11607537700

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Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.Evergreen-Washelli.com for the Engstrom family.