ENTREPRENEUR WAS CO-INVENTOR OF GAME CRANIUM

Richard Tait, an entrepreneur, business executive and venture capitalist who helped invent the board game Cranium, a familiar part of American family life in the late 1990s and 2000s, died on July 25 at his home in Bainbridge Island, Wash. He was 58.

His son Finn said the cause of death was complications of COVID-19.

In 1997, Richard Tait and his wife at the time, Karen Fries, were vacationing with another couple on Long Island, in the Hamptons, when someone suggested they play a board game. But they could not find a game everyone could enjoy. One couple dominated when they played Pictionary. The other won handily when they switched to Scrabble.

Then Tait had a thought: What if there was a game that let everyone play to their strengths? His friend Dan Katz, who won the Scrabble game that day, remembers Tait telling the room: “There has to be a way for everyone to feel comfortable.”

He soon designed a game that was part Pictionary, part Scrabble, part Trivial Pursuit and part Hangman. After sharing the idea with a colleague named Whit Alexander, the two expanded the game, adding mini-competitions that involved charades-like play-acting, sculpting shapes from clay and humming popular songs.

“We knew it would not be enough to just ask questions about music,” Alexander said in an phone interview. “We needed activities that allowed people to show their musical intelligence.”

The result was Cranium. Over the next decade, with help from two novel means of distribution — Amazon.com and the Starbucks coffee shop chain — they sold more than 44 million copies of the game and its sister titles in 22 countries before their company was acquired by the game and toy giant Hasbro.

“Cranium was — I am going to say it — a game changer,” said Chris Byrne, who was part of the team that launched Pictionary and is now a game and toy consultant known as The Toy Guy. “It revolutionized game play — and the social aspects of game play — for much of a generation.”

Richard John Tait was born on Jan. 17, 1964, at his home in Broughty Ferry, Scotland, a village on the north bank of the River Tay as it flows into the North Sea. His father, Thomas, was an executive at the Polaroid camera and technology company. His mother, Kathleen, worked part time as a secretary and receptionist at medical offices in Broughty Ferry and later in Helensburgh, about 90 miles to the southwest, where the family moved in the 1970s.

Tait studied computer science as an undergraduate at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before moving to the U.S., where he earned a master’s at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. When he finished his MBA, he took a job with Microsoft, in the suburbs of Seattle, just as that software maker was growing into one of the world’s most powerful corporations.

In the 1990s, during the heyday of multimedia CDROMs, Tait oversaw Microsoft’s catalog of reference titles, including the Encarta encyclopedia and Roget’s Thesaurus. He eventually became a kind of entrepreneur-in-residence at the company, launching five new Internet businesses inside Microsoft within four years, including Carpoint, a carbuying service, and Sidewalk, an online city guide.