Ed FriesFormer head, Microsoft Game Studios.

Ed Fries is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s, before joining Microsoft in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on Excel and Word. In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his passion for games, founding Microsoft Game Studios and laying the groundwork for the company’s entry into interactive entertainment. Over the next eight years, he grew the division from fifty people to more than twelve hundred, publishing over a hundred games—including more than a dozen million-sellers—and co-founding the original Xbox project. Since retiring from Microsoft in 2004, he has worked as an advisor, board member, and investor, and in 2019 helped launch 1Up Ventures, a fund dedicated to supporting independent game developers around the world.