[1] As a teen he programmed a clone of Frogger for the Atari 8-bit computers which was distributed through bulletin board systems.

Fries wrote two other games for Romox: Ant-Eater (similar to Dig Dug) and Sea Chase.

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.

working on bringing his favorite game,[citation needed] World of Warcraft, to three-dimensional life with his startup company, Figure Prints.