Richard Tait, the longtime Seattle entrepreneur who co-started the wildly well-liked board video game “Cranium” after paying 10 decades at Microsoft, has died. He was 58.

Tait handed away on Monday at his Bainbridge Island, Clean., home from “continued pulmonary difficulties thanks to COVID-19,” in accordance to a Facebook article by his family members, shared with GeekWire.

Cook Family Funeral Home of Bainbridge Island posted a short obituary. Information of his death was also shared in a observe to staff members from Valor Equity Associates Co-President Jonathan Shulkin. Tait had been a spouse at Valor Siren Ventures considering the fact that March 2019.

“It is with terrific sadness that Valor Fairness Partners announces the dying of our colleague and friend Richard Tait,” Shulkin wrote. “Our Valor local community, as well as the lots of individuals that labored with Richard in excess of the yrs, mourn his passing. He will be greatly skipped.”

Tait’s son, Finn Tait, also posted TikTok films and Instagram pics in which they remembered their father.

“He was a fantastic dad,” Finn reported in one particular video. “It was like possessing Willy Wonka for a father. I really like him pretty a lot and I’m heading to miss out on him a good deal.”

Tait started out at Microsoft in July 1988 and is credited with launching a series of new businesses at the tech large. He assisted pioneer customer server computing in the company’s running system division, ran the CD-ROM company with solutions like Encarta, and started off a quantity of customer-oriented on the internet providers which include Carpoint, Sidewalk and many others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tait was even the initially boss of recent Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whom he served recruit from Sunlight Microsystems in the early 1990s.

But it was Tait’s final decision to depart Microsoft in 1998 that would mostly outline his legacy, as he and fellow Microsoft government Whit Alexander co-started “Cranium.”

The game grew to become a person of the swiftest-advertising in background and spawned a amount of “Cranium”-branded adhere to-ups and…