[7] Creative Technology was founded in 1981 by childhood friends and Ngee Ann Polytechnic schoolmates Sim Wong Hoo and Ng Kai Wa.

Sim established Creative Labs, Inc. in the United States' Silicon Valley and convinced software developers to support the sound card, renamed Game Blaster and marketed by RadioShack's Tandy division.

Following Esber's departure, Sorkin was promoted to General Manager of Audio and Communication Products and later Executive Vice-president of Business Development and Corporate Investments, before leaving Creative in 1996 to run Elon Musk's first startup and Internet pioneer Zip2.

In January 1998 in order to quickly facilitate a working PCI audio technology, the firm made the acquisition of Ensoniq for US$77 million.

On 5 March 1998 the firm sued Aureal[11] with patent infringement claims over a MIDI caching technology[12] held by E-mu Systems.

[citation needed] In December 1999, after numerous lawsuits, Aureal won a favourable ruling but went bankrupt as a result of legal costs and their investors pulling out.

In November 2004, the firm announced a $100 million marketing campaign to promote their digital audio products, including the ZEN range of MP3 players.

On 22 March 2005, The Inquirer reported that Creative Labs had agreed to settle in a class action lawsuit about the way its Audigy and Extigy soundcards were marketed.

[25] In January 2009, the firm generated Internet buzz with a mysterious website[26] promising a "stem cell-like" processor which would give a 100-fold increase in supercomputing power over current technology, as well as advances in consumer 3D graphics.

[27] At CES 2009, it was revealed to be the ZMS-05 processor from ZiiLABS, a subsidiary formed from the combining of 3DLabs and Creative's Personal Digital Entertainment division.

[33] On January 4, 2023, Sim died at age 67, with president of Creative Labs Business Unit Song Siow Hui appointed as interim CEO.

Creative aggressively marketed the "stereo" aspect of the Sound Blaster (only the C/MS chips were capable of stereo, not the complete product) to calling the sound producing micro-controller a "DSP", hoping to associate the product with a digital signal processor (the DSP could encode/decode ADPCM in real time, but otherwise had no other DSP-like qualities).

Sound Blaster achieved competitive control of the PC audio market by 1992, the same year that its main competitor, Ad Lib, Inc., went bankrupt.

[36] In the mid-1990s, following the launch of the Sound Blaster 16 and related products, Creative Technologies' audio revenue grew from US$40 million to nearly US$1 billion annually.

[37] The Creative X-Fi Sonic Carrier, launched in January 2016, consists of a long main unit and a subwoofer that houses 17 drivers in an 11.2.4 speaker configuration.

It incorporates Dolby Atmos surround processing, and also features Creative's EAX 15.2 Dimensional Audio to extract, enhance and upscale sound from legacy material.