David Wu.Courtesy of family
David Wu: Programmer. Entrepreneur. Eccentric. Mentor. Born Oct. 14, 1974, in Washington, D.C.; died Oct. 7, 2022, in Redmond, Wash., of diabetic shock; aged 47.
There were two things that anyone who knew David Wu knew about him: that he liked to tinker and that he was utterly unbound by convention. As a child, he declined to sit at his school desk but instead sat under it, his things piled on top. Later in life, he believed the 24-hour day an arbitrary imposition and experimented with a 36-hour schedule. He was constantly tinkering with computer code and his diet, in a manner, unfortunately, that contributed to his premature death.
David was lucky to live and work in tolerant times and places. He put Toronto on the map in the 1990s and 2000s in the video-gaming industry as the co-founder of Pseudo Interactive, a leading developer, whose alumni went on to seed firms in Toronto, Montreal and Seattle.
David was born to immigrant scientists, Alan and Gillian, from Taiwan and England, who met at the University of Toronto as graduate students and were married at Massey College in a ceremony hosted by Robertson Davies. He grew up in North York, next to a ravine and across from a park, during an era when packs of children wandered freely. David attended an alternative school, which mixed children the ages of 5 through 13 in a single classroom and gave them the independence to find their own way. For David, it worked: He was highly self-motivated, though it did take him an awfully long time to learn to read.
David’s father died of a brain tumour when David was six. Soon thereafter, his mother bought an early computer – the Apple II, which over time transformed his life. David turned out to be a natural programmer and a math and physics prodigy. He went to U of T but dropped out after two years, having been recruited as a physics programmer by a computer-game company in Austin, Tex.
In 1995, after two years in Texas, he returned to Toronto to start Pseudo, launched in the family laundry room. His company landed a contract with Microsoft and over the next decade, Pseudo released four video game titles. By his mid-20s, David was the president and CEO with a toy-store-like office at Bay and Bloor downtown. He also took a chance on love, marrying Heather Spielvogel, a U of T PhD graduate in social work at a ceremony at Massey College.
David’s iconoclastic approach to life could make him hard to deal with. For a while, he subsisted on $2 a day, including all meals and transportation, relying on inexpensive proteins such as whey and soy which he bought in bulk. Always athletic, he decided to hack his own body, becoming extraordinarily muscle-bound. He worked obsessively, often to the exclusion of human contact.
David liked to give people their start and believed deeply that everyone had potential, including those who might seem odd to others. He built a large and loyal staff but after a decade, Pseudo hit hard times. In 2007, a major contract was cancelled. David, who was generous and soft-hearted, refused to fire people but it was no use.
It was a hard blow. David and Heather began a new life in Redmond, Wash., while David worked at Microsoft, as chief technology officer of the Halo game series. He was in the process of restarting Pseudo and looking for homes in Toronto during the last year of his life.
After a strong start at Microsoft, he fell into a funk; his marriage to Heather did not survive. He married a second time, to Alice Wilkes, a writer in the industry. But during the pandemic, he was again working too hard and eating too erratically and was too often, by choice, alone. He began to fall into short comas, which he ignored. They were, in fact, signs of undiagnosed diabetes. A week before his birthday, he never woke up. It was a tragic end for a Toronto original.
Tim Wu is David Wu’s brother.
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