Razer co-founder and gaming mouse pioneer Robert Krakoff has died

Image: Razer

Krakoff, the co-founder and former president of gaming hardware company Razer, died last week at the age of 81. It is possible that you have been impacted by Krakoff's legacy.

Krakoff was behind the first gaming mouse. It was the foundation of the entire gaming peripheral industry. Krakoff was in an ad for the Boomslang mouse in 2002 along with a professional gamer who had signed a historic sponsorship deal with the company.

The story of Razer is more complicated than most. The trademark for the brand of entity called Kärna was granted in 2005 and it was used to create an opto-mechanical wheel that could track a mouse's movements at 2000dpi. Even though optical mice were becoming a thing, the first gaming mouse rolled on wheels.

Krakoff and Min-Liang Tan co-founded the company in 2005, but neither of them invented the gaming mouse.

The Boomslang was designed by a company called Fitch, Inc., according to the first press release from the company.

Screenshot via Internet Archive

Robert Krakoff, general manager of the company, would become the public face of the company for its first decade and change, making an incredible impression as one of the most accessible public figures.

You would get a message from Razerguy with every product you purchased, and his public email address wasn't just for show. He was known to respond to fans and sit down for interviews with journalists who barely had a following. Sometimes he would give them jobs. He studied journalism at UCLA, though he did so on a football scholarship, according to his Facebook page.

In 2009, he told Sean, a similarly unknown journalist, that the company didn't need to sell a single unit of his brand-new Razer Mamba wireless mouse at its then-exorbitant price. He said the goal was to inspire a huge audience of gaming fans with the innovation, knowing they would choose other cheaper mice and merchandise from Razer.

He told me that he wished the company could make a left-handed mouse, but that he didn't have the power to do it. I smiled when I saw the first left-handed gaming mouse from Razer, a mirror-image version of its best-selling DeathAdder.

Krakoff was still an advisor to the company for many years. He founded MindFX Science, a brand that sells energy drinks and supplements that are a healthy alternative to the highly caffeinated energy drinks and pre-workout products.

Krakoff's life seemed to be about fitness. He played for the Los Angeles Rams for five years. Krakoff enjoyed playing tennis, biking, and fitness training as he grew older. He and his wife, Dr. Patsi Krakoff, wrote a book about the secrets to staying young and ran a fitness and nutrition website for seniors.

Since 2009, he has written a dozen books under the name RM Krakoff. After working as a writer, Krakoff said he put his pen where his mouth was and wrote everything from black comedies to sci-fi fantasies. America Unbound: Fighting Demons in a Vanished Democracy is a lot.

On Krakoff's Facebook page, he said he would split his time between Jalisco, Mexico and Peoria, Arizona, as he enjoyed being a sunbird and spending six months a year in each home. The cover art for most of Scott's novels was contributed by him.

Robert Krakoff, known by everyone as RazerGuy, passed away.

We are saddened by the passing of Co-Founder and President Emeritus, Robert Krakoff, known by everyone as RazerGuy. Robert’s unwavering drive and passion for gaming lives on and continues to inspire all of us.



Thank you Rob, you will be missed. pic.twitter.com/2HKNcFaOj2

— R Λ Z Ξ R (@Razer) April 28, 2022