Name Ed Fries | ||
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Ed Fries ( "freeze") is the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft during much of the Xbox's lifecycle.
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Fries fell in love with games while playing early arcade games like Frogger. 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 clones of popular arcade games on the Atari 800, and a publisher offered him the chance to have his games published.
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.
He was a prime evangelist of the platform to game developers and had an important role in the acquisition of developers Bungie Studios, Ensemble Studios and Rare.
Fries left Microsoft in January 2004. He consulted with a startup company, FireAnt, that was later sold to Sony Online Entertainment. He was also involved with several startups including Ageia, which aims to bring the first "physics accelerator" chip for games to market, and Emotiv Systems, a company building an EEG based game controller.
Fries is currently working on bringing his favorite game, World of Warcraft, to three-dimensional life with his startup company, Figure Prints. The company makes 3D models of a player's characters using a fleet of Z Corporation printers. Within the first 12 hours of his company going live, over 4,000 people had requested an order for a model. Fries explains in an interview that each model can take about one week to complete.
In July 2010, Fries released an Atari 2600 game inspired by the Halo series, called Halo 2600.
He is currently listed as the advisor for the Ouya, an Android-based game console and development platform.