Ed Fries

Ed Fries ( "freeze") (born May 14, 1964) is an American video game programmer and entrepreneur who was the vice president of game publishing at Microsoft during much of the Xbox's life-cycle.

Early life 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. As a teen he programmed a clone of Frogger for the Atari 8-bit computers which was distributed through bulletin board systems.

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.

Microsoft

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."

In the late 1990s he led the team that created the first version of the Xbox game console.

After Microsoft Fries left Microsoft in January 2004.

From 2012 until 2015 he was an advisor for the Ouya, an Android-based game console, as well as advisor for Animoca Brands and numerous other brands.

In 2019, Fries launched a game developer-focused venture fund entitled 1Up Ventures.