Ed Fries

Fries fell in love with games while playing arcade games in the early 1980s. Both of his parents were engineers, and he sees in his love for games something similar to his father's love for airplanes while working at Boeing.^[1] As a teen he programmed a clone of Frogger for the Atari 8-bit computers which was distributed through bulletin board systems.^[2] It was seen by someone from game publisher Romox who offered him a job, and the game was published as The Princess and the Frog in 1982. Fries wrote two other games for Romox: Ant-Eater (similar to Dig Dug) and Sea Chase.^[3] Ant-Eater was reviewed by C&VG, who gave it a 7/10 for "getting started," and graphics, a 4/10 for value, and a 7/10 for playability.^[4]

Fries co-founded Tom & Ed's Bogus Software with Tom Saxton. They developed the original Fish! screensaver, which was later adapted by Berkeley Systems into the popular series of Aquatic Realm / Fish! After Dark screensaver modules.^[5]

After earning a B.S. in Computer Science from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1986 Fries returned to the Seattle area to join Microsoft on productivity software. He has referred to this time as being like Ender's Game and says "We were recruited as children to fight in their wars, Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3 and Word vs WordPerfect."^[1]

In the late 1990s he led the team that created the first version of the Xbox game console.^[1] He was a prime evangelist of the platform to game developers and had an important role in the acquisition of developers Bungie, Ensemble Studios and Rare.^[6]