Ed Fries

Ed Fries created his first video games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s. He joined Microsoft in 1986, and spent the next ten years as one of the early developers of Excel and Word. He left the Office team to pursue his passion for interactive entertainment and created Microsoft Game Studios. Over the next eight years he grew the team from 50 people to over 1200, published more than 100 games including more than a dozen million+ sellers, co-founded the Xbox project, and made Microsoft one of the leaders in the video game business. In 2004, Ed retired from his Microsoft Vice President job to continue his work in the video game business as board member, advisor and consultant to a broad range of publishers, independent game developers, and media companies. In 2007 Ed launched his own startup, FigurePrints, an innovative company that uses 3D color printing technology to bring video game characters to life. In the summer of 2010 Ed released “Halo 2600”, a “demake” of the Halo video game series for the Atari 2600.