Ed Fries has fixed a rare color Gotcha game from 1973.
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Microsoft Games pioneer Ed Fries spends 3 months fixing Gotcha, the first color arcade game

Ed Fries was one of the pioneers of video games at Microsoft. He took over Microsoft’s game business in 1995 and moved it into the big leagues with titles like Age of Empires and Halo. He left in 2004, after 18 years as Microsoft’s top game software publisher. He had delivered 120 games, including 18 hits that sold more than a million units.

These days, Fries spends time with his family and works to restore classic arcade games. In 2010, he released an Atari 2600 game inspired by the Halo game series, dubbed Halo 2600. Now he’s back with a new project that only video game aficionados would love. Fries posted a long story on his blog about how he spent the last three months fixing Gotcha, the first color video game.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.