SEVEN-YEAR-OLD JIM FRIES HEARD THE plane before he saw it. Pulse quickening, he climbed to the top of his mother's rose ardor and raised his binoculars. The lenses pulled the sky just outside his reach. Clouds the size of buses blurred as he scanned the horizon. The drone grew louder. Any minute, now.

America was at war. Everywhere he turned--around the dinner table, on the radio, running and playing with school chums--people talked about the tanks, the guns, the solders in their uniforms, invasions, sorties. And they talked about the planes that held sway in the skies of America's foes.

The Boeing PT-17 Stearman, a biplane equipped with over 200 horsepower and a radial engine, perfect for airmen still learning to fly.

Lockheed's P-38 Lightning, a composition of a central housing for the cockpit and twin booms, boasted dual engines that made it ideal for crossing oceans as an escort to smaller fighter planes or to drop bombs in night raids. Jim knew he'd never spot one of those, not where he lived in America. But he knew the stories. In North Africa, a terrified German pilot surrendered himself to Allied soldiers at a base near Tunisia, pointing up at the sky and babbling "der Gableschwanz Teufl." The phrase translated to "fork-tailed devil" and struck fear in the hearts of the Luftwaffe.

Fork-tailed devils. Hellcats. Corsairs. B-29s… Jim wanted to see them all, but the sky held them out of reach. That would not do.

He swept his magnified vision across the sky again, and found it. His jaw dropped. He couldn't ID the aircraft--that would come later--but it was a thing of beauty. He stood rooted to the spot as the bird cut a path from one edge of existence to the next, the contrail left in its wake a signature from the pilot that seemed to read, I was here. You were not.

Jim lowered his binoculars and wrote in the notebook he'd carried to his perch. Its pages were filled with details of the aircraft he saw: size, shapes, colors, decals, wingspan. The more he heard and read about planes, the more accurately he matched up the details he logged with makes and models. Making one last notation, he set down pencil and paper and returned to monitoring the clouds. He imagined himself soaring among them.

Naturally, Jim Fries gravitated toward a partner as curious and passionate about technology and flight. He attended Bucknell University and pursued a degree in electrical engineering. While at school, he met Marilyn Ekiss, who studied chemical engineering. The two began dating and stayed together following Jim's graduation in 1958 when he moved to Seattle for a job at Boeing. Marilyn graduated a year later and joined him out west, where the two married and Marilyn interviewed for a position at Boeing. Her interview included a tour of the campus. When her guide suggested a shortcut, she found herself in a men's restroom.

"Boeing was a big, traditional company in the late '50s and early '60s," says Ed Fries, the youngest of Jim and Marilyn's three children: Bob, the eldest; and Karen and Ed, twins. "You could imagine that being a female engineer was unusual. She worked there as long as she could stand it, basically."

Marilyn made a habit of being unusual when contrasted against the Leave it to Beaver portrayal of women in the mid-20th century. Following a 10-year leave of absence from the workforce to raise her children, Marilyn became one of the first graduates of the University of Washington's then-nascent Master of Computer Science program. She juggled education and a full-time position at Digital Equipment Corporation as one of the company's first 100 salaried employees, only 36 of whom were women.

(Clients of tech companies took longer to come around to female engineers. When a customer called DEC to speak with an applications engineer and was connected to Barbara Stephenson, the company's first woman engineer and an MIT grad, he asked to speak with a "real engineer." Stephenson kept her cool and rattled off the modules DEC offered for assorted applications. The client paused again, longer this time, then shouted to a colleague, "Hey, Joe, guess what? I've got a woman engineer on the phone!")

Ed Fries counted himself lucky to grow up with parents as likely to spend a weekend flying one of their small planes as they were letting their three children tinker with computers and other gadgets around the house. Crucially, Jim and Marilyn never herded their kids toward tech. They were left to their own devices, sometimes literally. "I remember having pretty much free rein to do whatever the hell I wanted," Ed remembers. "I don't know if that was because that's how people parented back then, or if it was part of a clever strategy: They knew that if I showed an interest, I'd get turned off by it."

Everywhere Ed looked, something new triggered his curiosity. Once, he got hold of Piccolo Petes, small tubular fireworks that emit ear-piercing shrieks, and squeezed them in his father's vice to make them explode. Rather than scold his son, Jim taught Ed how to assemble something like it: wrap a piece of tinfoil snugly around a match head, poke a safety pin in the foil near the head, bend a paperclip to form into a launch bed, place the match tinfoil-wrapped match on the pad, and ignite it using a second match. It's a simple project that shows Newton's Laws of Motion, specifically the third law: For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

That reaction, Jim told his son, could be amplified by using a book of matches instead of two. "When it lights, all the thrust goes out the hole you made with the pin and they shoot up five feet or so," Ed adds. "I don't know how many parents would let their kids sit there and play with a book of matches for five hours, but mine did."

Ed learned to solder by watching his father build wire-controlled airplanes and experimenting on his own. One of his early creations was a fake bomb. "There are all these TV shows where someone is trying to disarm a bomb by clipping the right wire," he explains. "I built one in a coffee can, and it had a light censor and various things to defend itself: If you took the top off the coffee can, that would trigger the switch and it would 'go off.'"

The Fries children's freedom extended to the outdoors. Ed and his siblings met up with friends and roamed freely. One popular destination was a bowling alley a bicycle ride away. Pinball machines lined one dingy wall. Later, the proprietor replaced them with arcade games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Pac-Man.

Ed was entranced by the combination of graphics and sound. He had played around on his dad's calculators and his mom's terminals connected to mainframes at DEC, through which he tapped into early computer games like Colossal Cave Adventure. The family had also bought a Pong rip-off, a dedicated console that only played table tennis variants modeled after Atari's runaway hit. Arcade games were a different beast: bigger, flashier, and dependent on quarters to play. He saved spare change for trips to the bowling alley or to the Seattle Center, an amusement park with a cavernous arcade.

By the time Ed entered high school, it was clear to everyone that computers and programming held as much fascination for him as airplanes had for his dad. One Christmas morning, his parents rewarded his commitment with an Atari 800. "That was a big expense back then, so finding that under the tree was a big deal for me. I remember being disappointed because if I was going to get a computer, I probably wanted an Apple II."

Ed was familiar with the Apple II through his high school. One of the "holy trinity" of personal computers released in 1977 with the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80, the Apple II cost over twice as much as its competitors, but gained traction through initiatives that saw schools partner with Apple to stock classrooms with computers and software. Walking into math class one day, Ed and his classmates discovered several Apple II machines at the back of the room. Before long, the kids knew more about the device than their teacher, who banned games once the class started passing them around.

Within a few hours, Ed's disappointment at receiving an Atari 800 faded. The machine had 16 kilobytes (KB) of memory and a cassette deck for storage, and a dialect of BASIC, the language he learned in school. In short, he had everything he needed. "It was a bunch of work to type in a game in BASIC and then save it on some crappy cassette you have lying around. Usually it would be lost and you had to type it in 10 more times. But that helps you learn, too. I was probably equally in love with programming as I was with games, and that was a good thing."

Rather than come up with ideas, Ed preferred to study games he'd played and clone them. "That's sort of still how I make games. I see something and go, 'I can make that.' I've never considered myself a game designer. Even the game I did for the Atari 2600 back in 2010, Halo 2600--I took elements of Halo and elements of Adventure and mashed them together. For me, it's more about the technical challenge of trying to do something difficult."

Once his skills were sharp enough, Ed wrote Space Combat, a ripoff, or clone, of the Spacewar! computer game that originated at MIT and was famously cloned by Atari as Computer Space, the first commercially released video game. He put finishing touches on Space Combat and submitted it to Atari Program Exchange (APX), a third-party publishing outfit established by engineer Dale Yocum in 1981. APX permitted anyone to submit programs and, if published, cut creators in on 10 percent of net royalties.

To Ed's dismay, APX rejected his hack. "I saw the letter recently, and really what they did was say, 'We don't like these three things. Just fix them.' But I remember at the time being devastated that they didn't like my game. So I think maybe in the back of my head I was hoping I could do this as a career, but there just weren't many people making games."

His next project was Froggie, a rip-off of Frogger. Ed shared it with a friend, uploaded it to one of his favorite BBSes (bulletin board systems) for others to try, and forgot about it. Weeks later, he got a call from a company called Romox in California. One of their managers downloaded the game, loved it, and tracked down Eddy Fries, the name Ed used on the game's title screen. "I have no idea how they did," he admits. "By that time, in 1981, how do you find a person named Eddie Fries in the country? They approached me and asked if I wanted to make games for them."

The offer rendered him speechless. He worked nights at Shakey's Pizza and coded games in his spare time. Someone paying him money seemed farfetched. Only the people at Atari, and mysterious developers in Japan, made games. Romox assured him the offer was legit. "That was like... wow. It was like being discovered. I guess I'd say it was kind of a dream that I might do someday."

Romox offered Ed five percent of royalties if he agreed to let them publish Froggie. He weighed his options: nights at a pizza parlor, or getting paid to make video games. "I signed immediately. That was probably the first contract shoved in front of me. Didn't even negotiate. I wouldn't see any money until the game was done selling in stores. That was okay."

Ed converted Froggie to myriad personal computers and reworked game elements at Romox's request to ensure Konami wouldn't sue them for copying Frogger. He turned it around in record time, so Romox gave him another project, and another. "A guy there would send me a one-page description of what he wanted, and his designs were derivative" of other well-known titles. One of Ed's games, Ant Eater, puts players in control of an ant that digs to the surface and steals scraps of food from picnics while avoiding anteaters.

While Ant Eater takes cues from Dig Dug, Ed's next project, Sea Chase, was original. Players navigate their vessel through a grid of mines as they fire torpedoes at a destroyer at the top of the screen. Every level adds treasures to collect and more obstacles to contend with, such as sharks armed with explosives.

By the time Ed left home for New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology to follow in his mom's footsteps as a student of computer science, his royalty checks covered enough of his tuition that he forewent picking up another job to focus on school. His decision to attend university outside of Seattle served as a small but significant act of rebellion: Ed had also applied and been accepted to the University of Washington, his mom's alma mater. And his brother's. And his twin sister's. "I'd spent my whole life being the middle child between a twin sister and a brother who's 14 months older. All through school: 'Oh, you're Karen's brother' or 'You're Bob's brother.' The idea that I could go somewhere else seemed very interesting to me."

His choice of college had as much to do with New Mexico Tech's reputation as his desire to carve out an identity. Over much of her career as an engineer, Marilyn Fries had programmed computers by punch cards. New Mexico Institute was a small school with lots of experience in government research. That meant more modern computers and more opportunities. "The University of Washington had people standing in line waiting for a turn at a terminal. New Mexico Tech had lots of cutting-edge equipment," he says.

Everything changed in 1984. Midway through his degree program, the North American video game market crashed and Romox, along with dozens of other companies, crashed with it. Without royalties, Ed needed to find a job. He found two. The first was a gig running a VAX 750 mainframe as a systems administrator, with hours perfect for a student. The second, attained when he went home for the summer, was as a programmer at StarCom, a small company based in Seattle, where he programmed databases for a program called Files & Folders.

The following spring, Ed filled out applications at computer companies in Seattle ahead of returning home for another break. StarCom invited him to reclaim his old job. He had other plans. " I sent a resume to Microsoft, and they immediately contacted me and offered to fly me out to Seattle. I was living in New Mexico, so I was happy at the chance to fly home and do this interview. I remember being like, 'Yeah. I'm flying home to interview.' It was a cool experience. They offered me a summer job."

An internship at Microsoft held irony not lost on Ed. He had gone to school in New Mexico to pave his own path into technology. Meanwhile, Marilyn had left DEC for Microsoft, and Ed's brother and sister worked there, too.

Ed's internship started in the summer of 1985, a period that, in retrospect, was an inflection point for both Ed and the company. Microsoft was still a privately owned company, and the first version of Windows was several months out from release. Instead of a sprawling campus, the company owned a few buildings, one of which was located across from a fast-food joint called Burgermaster. "We could hit a special sequence on our phones and it would dial Burger Master so we could go get our lunch," Ed says.

Microsoft's bread and butter was MS-DOS, or Microsoft Disk Operating System, a text-driven interface where users typed in commands instead of clicking icons. Ed's internship assigned him to the computer-based training (CBT) group, a unit dedicated to designing tutorials that taught neophyte users how to use their computers and software. The CBT group designed tutorials using ASCII characters, a series of letters, numbers, and symbols such as spaces and punctuation. Programmers arranged ASCII characters in configurations that resembled a primitive form of graphics. "They would make whole scenes: a picture of an office building all out of slashes and bars and other characters. They were quite good at it."

Microsoft wanted Windows 1.0 out by the end of the summer. That put pressure on everyone, including the CBT group, whose members worked long hours on the internal tools used to build tutorials, and the tutorials themselves. The company knew it would take time for users to adopt Windows, so CBT's management assigned a skeleton crew to maintaining the DOS versions of tools and programs. Ed joined that crew as an intern. Instead of being upset that he couldn't work on new, innovative software, he had a blast working with other internal groups who depended on CBT for their own needs.

"A lot of times you work on something and it doesn't ship for years," Ed explains. "You feel disconnected from it. But Microsoft people would be in my office saying, 'Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?' I was a hotshot little programmer. I'd put up what they wanted and give them the features they wanted."

Amazed by the new kid's quick turnaround times, his peers dubbed him "Fast Eddie." Ed beamed at the nickname. Despite only being an intern, he was already building a reputation separate from that of his family's.

One afternoon, an artist stepped into his office. "I'm doing a scene in a dentist's office," she explained. "You know how when you go to the dentist's, there's always a fish tank? I want a fish tank, but I think it'll look lame if the fish are just hanging there in space."

Ed considered. "You want me to make it so they can move?"

"Can you do that?" she asked.

"Definitely."

The artist had already composed fish out of ASCII characters. Ed wrote an animation system that displayed the fish in frames. Each frame depicted the fish in a different position, and the system looped them so they appeared to swim.

"That turned out really nice," he said when he sent his code to the artist. "If you make me more fish, I have an idea for a project on the side." She obliged, sending him ASCII art depicting larger and more varied fish. That night, Ed wrote a program that animated them so they swam across his screen. Next, he assembled fronds of seaweed out of a string of parentheses and, using his system, made them sway. Now and then, the fish blew bubbles (lowercase and uppercase Os) that floated toward the surface (the top edge of the monitor) as the fish wandered their virtual aquarium.

Ed called his program Fish-O-Rama and shared it with the artist. She gave it to other colleagues, who passed it to others. Within a few weeks, Ed noticed Fish-O-Rama running on screens when he left for the night. By accident, he had created a screensaver.

In the spring of 1986, Ed graduated from New Mexico Tech and moved back to Seattle. Unlike many college grads, he could bypass the stress of looking for a job. Microsoft had called weeks before graduation to offer him a full-time position. He accepted.

"I wasn't sure what I'd be working on, but I knew coming out of college that I had at least one offer."