We tried to do to them what we did to Lotus, which is build a better product and beat them. Then I moved over to run Word, where we were battling WordPerfect. That was called the technical lead at Microsoft. I worked my way up from youngest programmer to co-lead programmer. Which was sort of the theme of my career. It was fun to be this kind of rebellious underdog group trying to go against the big guys.
HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN YOU HAVE USING YOUR PSN STUFF SOFTWARE
Lotus 1-2-3 was the biggest PC software product in the world, and Lotus was the biggest PC software company. We had a really difficult task to fight Lotus. They put me on the first version of Excel for Windows. I had to get a real job, so I went to work at Microsoft. All these game companies went out of business, including the one I worked for. I was in college in 1984 when the game industry famously melted down. I worked for them through the end of high school and the first couple years of college. It was my dream at that time to go into games. Someone saw it at a company called Romox down in California. I wrote an assembly version of Space War, and then a version of Frogger called Froggy. I was lucky enough to get an Atari 800, and I taught myself to program, first in BASIC and assembly. I was in high school starting in 1979, and we had the first Apple IIs at school. People said, “Why are you throwing your career away?”įries: If I can go back a bit before that, I started writing games in high school. Took over the games division in 1995 when it had 150 developers. You joined Microsoft as an intern in 1985 and as an employee in 1986. GamesBeat: To refresh people about some of your career, I’ll read some things here, but maybe you can chime in about what some of this early experience was like in games back then. Bill knew I was having a kid, but didn’t know his name, so he just wrote, “Ed Junior’s First Toy” on that Xbox and signed it. The Japanese launch was February 22, 2002, and my first son was born on March 21, 2002. As far as the best response, definitely the custom Xboxes, and the Japanese Xbox signed by Bill Gates for my son. Some of them were just, “Here’s a bunch of shirts.” Some are better than others, for sure. GamesBeat: You had about 30 days’ worth of things to show?įries: I think I did 45 or so. I know that collectors have seen the wooden Xbox cut from Japan, and they’re going to be out there scouring the world to find one of those. I probably have a bit of a collector’s mindset. I’ve been a bit of a collector myself, like with arcade machines.
But it was fun to get people’s reactions. It seemed like every cupboard I opened or shelf I looked on, there was something related to Xbox.
I think Xbox is just such a part of my life that it infected every part of my house as well. Why did you keep it all? What’s gotten the best response so far?Įd Fries: I was worried my wife was getting more followers on Instagram than I was! But no, why did I keep it all? I don’t know.
You’ve been sharing all this swag on social media about your Xbox days. It’s good to have Ed here to remind us how difficult it was and how much heavy lifting had to be done by so many people. GamesBeat: People assume Microsoft’s success in the game business was preordained.
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