LIKE A SPREADSHEET WITH THE right formulas plugged into its cells, Ed "Fast Eddie" Fries's career options multiplied. Five years, three versions of Microsoft Excel, and one lead developer credit later, he managed a roster of 50 programmers working on the next version of the spreadsheet program. When his manager, Chris Peters, got promoted to run the Word team, Peters quarreled with Word's development manager, leading to the manger's resignation. Peters asked Fries if he'd like to fill the vacant position.

It was the next logical step for Fries's career. "The development manager was more the manager position over programmers, whereas the technical lead is the guy who understands everything about a project's system. I knew nothing about Word when I went over, but I knew how to manage programmers."

Fries knew how to wage battle against bigger opponents. He and the Excel team had emerged victorious against Lotus 1-2-3, the PC's first killer app until myriad technical issues and delays enabled Microsoft to erode its user base. On Word, his opponent was WordPerfect, the de facto word processor of choice because of its availability on an array of computers and operating systems.

Over five years and several updates, Peters, Fries, and their army gained ground. Naturally, Word made the jump to Windows first. WordPerfect failed to transition for a year, ceding ground to Microsoft. As the battle intensified, Microsoft leveraged its relationship with PC manufacturers to bundle Office, a suite containing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with their machines. From now on, anyone who purchased a computer that came preloaded with Windows also received Office, giving them no reason to try out or return to WordPerfect.

By the late summer of 1992, WordPerfect, a one-product company, held only 30 percent of the Windows market. Word continued to add more features such as the ability to save and open documents in WordPerfect's format. Its competitor, stagnating in DOS, lacked that compatibility. By the late '90s, the option to open WordPerfect documents vanished from Word. Most customers didn't notice. Microsoft held approximately 85 percent of the market. Younger users, such as kids writing school papers, probably had never heard of any alternative.

As Word flourished in early 1996, Peters talked to Fries about what he wanted to do next.

He had been a development manager for going on six years between Excel and Windows. The next step for employees interested in climbing Microsoft's corporate ladder was to run a business within the company. Around the same time, Fries bumped into an employee from the games group, who mentioned that Tony Garcia, general manager, was on his way out.

Fries's passion for games had never waned since his days writing and selling clones of Frogger. He kept up with consoles like the PlayStation and Super Nintendo, and PC games. The prospect of running Microsoft's games division sounded like the perfect two-for-one deal: He'd climb to the next rung up the ladder and manage an area that excited him.

He set up an interview and toured the games area, where he got a sneak peek at products. Ensemble's Age of Empires caught his eye right away. He was a big fan of Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer: Red Alert, a sequel/prequel of sorts that invited players to partake in an alternate-history version of World War II. Likewise, he marveled at the games taking advantage of the next wave of graphics hardware. "It was right at the transition when the first 3D accelerators were coming out for PCs, so the whole PC gaming business was moving from 2D to 3D. That was an exciting time in games. Microsoft was building out DirectX and evangelizing Windows as a platform for game development and gaming. All those pieces were coming together."

Fries was just as impressed with the caliber of talent on the team. Stuart Moulder and Ed Ventura were industry pros, and Tim Znamenacek was doing an excellent job producing Age of Empires for Ensemble. Shannon Loftis and Bonnie Ross had even more experience. Loftis accepted a position at Microsoft in 1993 and made her way to the games group, where she worked on early versions of online card games. Ross, one of few women in Colorado State University's engineering major, started her career in games in 1994 as a producer on sports titles such as Electronic Arts' NBA: Inside Drive before coming to Microsoft and working on PC games as a producer.

Despite a growing list of reasons to take the position, he harbored doubts. "When I interviewed over there, it was more like me trying to decide if I would take the job rather than them interviewing me."

Fries considered himself a gamer. He played them, programmed them, kept up with them. The problem was the games team's reputation as Microsoft's ugly duckling. It made money, but its profits paled compared to those generated by Office and Windows. When word got out that he was contemplating the open management position, VPs would pull him into their offices and cautioned him against taking the job. Others were blunt: "There were vice presidents who told me I was committing career suicide. My direct vice president above me in Office said, 'Why would you leave Office, one of the most important parts of this company, to go work on something no one cares about?'"

Troubled, Fries went to talk with Mike Maples. The two had occupied adjoining offices when Fries was a junior programmer, and Maples had progressed to executive vice president of Worldwide Products Group and one of Bill Gates's most trusted lieutenants. Fries had always got on with Maples, who was well-liked because of his approachability.

Maples listened, then rendered his opinion. "It's hard to predict the future," he said. "You should just do what you think is right and see what happens."

That was exactly what Fries needed to hear. "You should just do what you think is right and see what happens.' I loved that, so I went to do it. When that vice president told me I was committing career suicide, what he didn't know was how good that sounded to me. Going to work on something nobody cares sounded great."

Over his five years on Word, Fries had thought of his role as development manager as the guy who had to say no. Microsoft and its business partners expected a new version of Word every 12 to 18 months. Because the product made so much money, other managers and executives tried to elbow in and give Fries unsolicited advice or ask to incorporate this or that feature or new technology into the next release. He calmly but firmly said no to most of them, even those who occupied the company's pantheon.

"Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates--they're trying to derail the project. They don't mean to, but they have ideas, they have initiatives, they have company strategies they're trying to execute. Meanwhile, we're trying to ship a product. I would say, 'No. We're not going to do that because it will put our schedule at risk. We don't believe you'll ship your thing on time, and we don't want our ship date dependent on yours.' To go somewhere nobody cared about where I could make cool stuff and sell it just sounded really great."

Fries's decision paid off right away. Soon after joining, senior members of his team told him they were planning a trip to Japan to check out some games and asked if he'd like to go along. Fries accepted with alacrity; he'd visited the country back in '88 and loved the culture. This time, his long, wavy blonde hair and movie star smile made him as fascinating to the locals as they were to him. "Everywhere I went, people would stare at me and ask to touch my hair."

For the next two weeks, Fries floated as he visited studios and met the developers. He met executives at Sega, and, while at Capcom, was invited to preview an early build of a horror game in development for Sony's PlayStation, called Biohazard. "This is like Alone in the Dark," he said.

Capcom's developers beamed. "Yes, yes! That was our inspiration!"

During a tour of Konami, designers showed him a prototype of a gigantic arcade cabinet called Dance Dance Revolution. It was outfitted with pads, and the designers explained to Fries that users played by stepping on different parts of the pad in time with on-screen prompts that appeared as popular songs blasted out of the speakers.

"What do you think?" they asked as he stepped off.

"I'm a programmer, not a dancer," he told them.

By the time he and his colleagues were scheduled to fly back to the States, any lingering doubts had vanished. I get to fly around the world and meet great game developers, he thought. I have the best job in the world.

ED FRIES ARRIVED IN THE games group as the new kid in more ways than one. In his early 30s, his lanky frame and baby-face good looks made him look like a 20-year-old fresh out of college. He set a low-key vibe right away by wandering out to foosball tables and playing against anyone who was around.

"I met people that way, just playing foosball, and it wasn't until a while later they realized they'd played with the new boss. I always had an open-office policy and tried not to be a scary boss. Sometimes I guess I can be scary, but I tried to be approachable and one of the team members."

The group's gamers recognized him as one of their own. "Ed was a bigger gamer than anybody else on the team. He loved games and had tinkered with them, made some stuff," remembers Tim Znamenacek.

Where Tony Garcia was gregarious and extroverted, Fries, Ed Ventura observed, appeared more thoughtful and methodical. "He was respected," Ventura says. "He did a lot of great work on Excel. But I think Ed wanted to do something in games. Because they didn't want to lose somebody like Ed, they let him do what he wanted."

Fries fit the description of what the Microsoft faithful called a Baby Bill. Gates identified the best workers in his company and kept them satisfied with a robust stock option plan known for turning out over 4,000 millionaires and six billionaires by August 1998. Those stock options were known inside and outside of Microsoft as the golden handcuffs. A Baby Bill was someone smart and savvy enough to slip free of the cuffs and leave Microsoft to start a company likely to be positioned as a competitor. If Fries wanted to produce games, the powers that be preferred he do it for them.

The group's new boss showed his keen eye for talent right away by appointing Stuart Moulder, the games veteran from Sierra and one of the biggest cheerleaders for Age of Empires, still in development, as one of his lieutenants. Before Tony Garcia left, he'd brokered a deal with the Bruce Artwick Organization to move the team to Microsoft in Redmond. Fries picked up from there and got the team settled. "That increased our head count by close to 30 people," he says. "So we had Flight Simulator, which was the engine for the whole business. It was generating profit year-over-year, and there was a very good team."

Fries turned Moulder, Ventura, and other product managers loose to continue scouting talented developers while he acclimated to his position, and that of his group, which he perceived as being treated like a tagalong inside the consumer group. "My first business card said, 'Kids and Games Group,' which wasn't awesome."

While his scouts scouted, Fries familiarized himself with ongoing projects. Age of Empires came together nicely, and other developers seemed on the verge of breakthroughs. "One group was looking into MMOs. Another looked into an online gaming service, which ultimately became Internet Gaming Zone and then Microsoft Gaming Zone."

The Internet Gaming Zone came to fruition through the efforts of several developers, one of whom, Steve Murch, had worked on

Microsoft Access, a database program, before moving to the consumer division where Patty Stonesifer, senior vice president of interactive media, hoped to blanket the consumer space with over 75 CD-ROM applications that catered to myriad interests and hobbies. "This was pre-Internet in 1993," says Murch. "Patty and others invested pretty heavily in, 'Let's have a CD-ROM for film, and one for wine, and one for maps, and let's have an encyclopedia.'"

Two years later, J Allard, an executive passionate about the potential of the Internet, pushed Bill Gates to embed Microsoft deeper in the World Wide Web. Gates did his homework and, convinced, drafted a memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave and emailed it to every executive at Microsoft. "One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing," he wrote, noting that he had surfed the Web for over 10 hours with nary a sign of an Excel spreadsheet, Word document, or AVI file, the company's video format.

"Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network," the memo continued. "This inversion where a public network solves a problem better than a private network is quite stunning. This inversion points out an opportunity for us in the corporate market."

Gates's memo struck a chord with Murch, who responded with a 12-page paper on how Microsoft could harness the Internet. One of his pillars was a platform for online games. "My view from the database group, but also from Harvard, was that Microsoft was a platform company. Their real strategic benefit is that the products and the experiences work together," he says, pointing to how Office grew into a hub for programs like Outlook and Access in addition to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. "Integration is Microsoft's wheelhouse, and I still believe having products work together is a key advantage of their platforms."

From what Murch understood of the games group based on observing it from afar, it lacked a central platform. An online service could serve as a hub to which all Microsoft games connected. "I like games," Murch adds. "I've written them and played them, but I'm more attracted to the technical challenges in that category that push envelopes. I was amazed at what id Software could do with Doom, even though I have ethical concerns with it. I'm much more of a productivity products kind of guy, but I respect games."

Overnight, Gates looped Murch into email threads. Not only was the co-founder interested in Murch's ideas for online games, he and Melinda, his wife and a manager at the company, played bridge obsessively with billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Murch marveled at having his name in an asynchronous conversation with the likes of Gates and Buffet. "I went to my assistant and said, 'Could you estimate the approximate net worth of the people in this email thread?' That was when I'd been at Microsoft for three of four years and was super-proud of getting into X number of digits" courtesy of his stock options. "I told her, 'This is kind of insane that I'm in this email thread with these famous people.'"

In one missive, Gates brought up an online gaming service called the ImagiNation Network (INN) and asked Murch if Microsoft should acquire it. Murch and Stuart Moulder flew out to Sierra On-Line, proprietors of the service, for due diligence. The brainchild of Sierra co-founder Ken Williams and originally known as the Sierra Network, INN went online in 1991. That made it one of the earliest dedicated online gaming services behind Sega's Meganet, a dial-up service in Japan launched in 1990 that required the Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in the States) to run.

Moulder, who had worked on INN before coming to Microsoft, let Murch lead the evaluation to avoid compromising his objectivity. Murch saw potential, but felt its downsides outnumbered its benefits. "I was very uninterested in the fact that their whole network was proprietary," Murch remembers. "It would all have to be rewritten, and we'd spend the next three years trying to rewrite everything. Sure, we'd get a couple hundred thousand customers, maybe 500,000."

On the other hand, INN was the largest gaming service of the era. Gates and Buffet used it for their bridge games. There was just one more downside: An asking price of over $50 million. "Bill had said, 'Why don't we just buy this?'" Murch continues. "I said, 'Well, we could, but here are reasons why that might not be a good idea. But I'll do it if you want to do it.'"

Murch searched for other opportunities, using Yahoo! to keep tabs on what games people were playing and how they connected. One morning, a small company popped up on his radar. It was called The Village, owned by Electric Gravity and created by three developers, Kevin Binkley, Ted Griggs, and Hoon Im. To their surprise, The Village maintained an install base of around 50,000 players. Murch informed Moulder and Fries, who had stayed in the loop as the games group's general manager. Fries and Murch flew out to meet with the entrepreneurs. They arrived at a household where one of the guys lived with his mother. He kicked his mom out of the house to give the meeting a more professional air.

"They had done a lot," Fries says. "This was a small project run by a small group of guys who'd done everything themselves. We really liked it."

One aspect of the meeting sticks out to Fries. The guys were open to selling, and they asked for approximately three million, one million for each of them. "We structured the deal so they got the money over time with payouts and stuff, so we could meet their goal," Fries adds with a laugh. "For us, it was cheap compared to spending $50 million-plus on this ImagiNation thing. And they were good guys, so that's what we did. We acquired it and moved them up."

The Village morphed into Internet Gaming Zone, a one-stop location where users could play games like Monster Truck Madness, published by Microsoft and developed by Fury3 studio Terminal Reality, and more laid-back titles such as the card games developed by Shannon Loftis and other developers. To combat gaming services such as Total Entertainment Network (TEN) and Kali, Microsoft offered access to the Internet Gaming Zone for free.

To the surprise of many, an order of magnitude more players flocked to casual games than more "core" titles. "We had this misguided idea we were going to use it as an on-ramp to bring non-gamers into becoming gamers through playing card and board games online," Fries admits. "Then, ultimately, they'd play our bigger games."

As the Zone came together, Fries joked with Moulder that Hearts would be the most popular game on the service. Moulder shook his head. "Spades," he said.

"He was 100 percent right," Fries recalls.

Bridge may not have been the most popular casual game, but it was arguably the most important. "There was high stress around getting the Bridge game right," Fries says. "If there was some problem, we'd hear about it directly from Bill Gates, which is pretty funny. I think he liked the whole idea of online gaming and he could see it was important for the future, but he also really liked to play Bridge with his buddies."

(Buffett and Gates still play Bridge several times a week. In 2020, their platform of choice is Bridge Base, a free website and app service. "I’ve been playing bridge for years—Warren Buffett is my favorite partner," Gates wrote on May 18, in an article suggesting books and other activities to keep busy indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic. "I got worried a couple months ago when their service briefly went down," he continued, referring to Bridge Base, "but it was back up in no time. I was surprised at how relieved I was to see it running again.")

Internet Gaming Zone went through multiple name changes, first to the Zone, then ultimately the MSN Gaming Zone. "Before there were mobile games, there was the casual game business. We had a server center in our building, this little air-conditioned room that only certain people could enter."

Fries landed one of the service's most popular games by accident. On a flight back to Seattle, he sat next to a young developer who was working on a game. Fries had his team reach out to the developer and sign his game, which Microsoft's marketing experts named Bejeweled. Eventually, Bejeweled spun out from Microsoft and became the cornerstone of PopCap, which raked in millions from its gem-swapping puzzle game and Plants vs. Zombies, a charming and addictive tower-defense game where players defend their yard from waves of undead by growing plants that spit seeds, lob watermelons, and defend other units.

"That company went on to do very well," Fries says modestly. "I tried to buy them a few years later for four million dollars. They turned me down. A few years after that, someone tried to buy them for $40 million, and they turned them down. Ultimately, they sold the company to EA for over a billion dollars. It worked out for them."

Concurrently, Steve Murch decided the games group was not working out for him. "Ed and I sometimes butted heads on the major issue that was holding my group up even after we had acquired Electric Gravity."

Murch and Fries held differing notions on how to release the Internet Gaming Zone. Murch wanted to build it into Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser. Users would create an account and log in to access their games and other products, each of which functioned as a spoke in Microsoft's hub. Fries preferred to offer downloadable files, the same as traditional boxed games on PC. He and Village co-creators Hoon Im and Kevin Binkley worked like programmers: When they got an idea for a feature or found a bug, they opened the code and fixed it.

"Hoon going and fixing bits in production made it very difficult for a QA manager to even know the codebase of a product," Murch admits. "My office became a bit of a revolving door. Hoon came in and said we needed to be more aggressive; then he'd leave, close the door, and Brandi," his QA manager, "would come in and say this whole thing was super-frustrating because she didn't even know where the product was at any time."

Murch knew why Fries and Im operated the way they did. Their approach would become known as agile development, a lengthy process of continued improvements and flexibility to better respond to changing priorities. "Ed, Hoon, and that contingent were more correct in the long run. It didn't really work and brought in a lot of conflict. Not throwing things at each other, but we were all passionate about what we were building. It did end up with more hard feelings, I think, because people weren't all moving at the same pace. We spent another five or six years as a division, and I left during that time, saying we should have had a single login."

Fries was embroiled in other battles, most of which involved the reputation of his team and their role within Microsoft. Another team built the Microsoft Network (MSN) as an array of Internet services such as news and email for Windows. Fries saw MSN as a natural connector for Internet Gaming Zone and pushed to spotlight the service on the network's front page.

"No way," one developer said. People use email and news every day."

"If you put a link to games on your front page," Fries rejoined, it will be the most clicked link."

"That's ridiculous."

Fries shrugged. "Try it and see."

Soon after, games became a fixture on MSN.