At the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, Ed Fries has just finished an on-stage presentation with Atari veteran Ron Milner. The talk – sometimes technical, often playful – focused on Fries’ effort to uncover the first ever video game Easter egg, which turned out to be hidden deep in the circuitry of Milner’s 1977 release Starship 1. It is late in 2017, and it is apparent that the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft is enjoying an experience very different from his visits to GDC and E3 during the first Xbox’s heyday. In Portland there are no PRs nervously flanking his movements through the crowds. Fries, Milner and a handful of the audience chat casually about early Atari hardware, and nobody even mentions what it was like to lead the team that created the original Xbox. Yet despite the relaxed atmosphere, Fries can’t quite settle. He is animated, and while he’s enthusiastically chatting, eventually he can’t hold out anymore. “I’ve got something exciting to get back to in my hotel room,” he explains, before dashing off. It turned out that a friend had dropped off a selection of prototype arcade boards secured from an early Atari engineer. And Fries had been waiting a long time to see them up close. What was on those boards? Fries and some fellow enthusiasts might have uncovered the very first known video game ROM. ROMs – or more accurately ‘Read Only Memory’ chips containing data and code – were hugely significant in making the mass… [Read full story]