Tod R. Frye (born 1955) is an American computer programmer once employed by Atari, Inc., and is most notable for developing the home adaptation of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 video computer system. Following the collapse of Atari he worked at video game and computer game companies such as 3DO and Pronto Games.
In 2015 he was working as Senior Embedded Software Engineer for the SunPower Corporation, where he worked in the field of IoT, developing hardware and software systems for monitoring solar power systems. His work extended from 'edge' devices, collecting and transmitting device telemetry, to cloud hosted Big Data systems for storing, analyzing, and reporting device data.
Leaving Sunpower in late 2016, Frye joined Bonsai AI, which was developing an artificial intelligence platform, focusing primarily on reinforcement learning.
Atari Pac-Man
Frye landed the 2600 Pac-Man project in early 1981. Atari had licensed the arcade games Defender and Pac-Man and while Frye preferred Defender, when fellow programmer Bob Polaro got that assignment, Frye got Pac-Man by default.[1] Frye's landing the high-profile title did not pass without critical comment from fellow developers at Atari, as Frye was a newer employee. One Atari employee wrote "Why Frye?" on the Pac-Man arcade machine contained in Atari's in-office arcade room.