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==