Eddie M.N. Ritterman

Eddie is one of the higher-up employees who knew about the Experiments at Playtime Co.
Preston Willard claims in the Orientation Notebook that nobody he knows has ever met Eddie and implies he is a complete mystery to the low-ranking employees, to the point where Preston says, "Everything I know about him is just rumors.". Preston writes that he does believe in his existence, however.

This may have been added to the book to reference Eddie's extremely low relevance in the story up until that time, having very few appearances despite his executive role.

The contract that Eddie proposed in 1972 may have been related to the construction of Playcare, which finished its construction in 1976. If so, this provides an estimate of the construction time of Playcare, being around 4 years.

His full name, Edward, was revealed in Chapter 5 in a document. Before that, his first name was thought to be Eddie.

Dr. Bruno White eventually turned Harley into a sort of machine and acclimated to a new role. Eddie promoted Dr. White to head of the Secondary Laboratory, instructing him to extract however much knowledge he could gain from Sawyer and assuring him that he would act "better" than Sawyer.

In August 1995, Eddie reviewed Leith Pierre's concerns surrounding Richard Lovitz, the Head of Shipping. When Leith stated they couldn't deal with him without making him a martyr, Eddie suggested promoting him to their level, as doing so would make him "one of us" and thus ruin his reputation as a "people's champion". He also confirmed he would be away from the factory, inspecting Playpark between August 7 and August 12.[16] This schedule meant he would be absent from the factory on August 8, the day The Hour of Joy commenced.

At some point, Eddie Ritterman wrote a letter to Warrenbach Construction regarding a project that involved them building a laboratory within Playtime Co. He offered Warrenbach a ballpark figure of $100,000 due to the project's secrecy.

In the 1990s, Eddie arranged for the company to acquire poppy seeds from an external source, for some sort of cryptic project, likely related to the Bigger Bodies Initiative.

After the events of the Theater Incident, the higher-ups had a meeting in which it was revealed that Eddie had organized a clean-up of the Theater to dispose of any evidence, making sure that nothing confidential could ever become public knowledge, while trying to calm the exacerbated Leith by telling him to think rationally.

Following Gerad Lockehart's proclamation that it was Dr. Harley Sawyer who caused the Theater Incident, the other higher-ups got together once again to reach a conclusion on what to do. During this meeting, Eddie expressed his discontent toward Dr. Sawyer, claiming that he did not care about anyone's safety and indirectly suggesting that he should be killed off - only to the disagreement of Leith Pierre due to Sawyer's expertise and knowledge being vital for the Bigger Bodies Initiative. During the impasse on what to do with Sawyer, Leith proposed one idea to deal with him.

Before construction of The Shelf began, Eddie showed Warrenbach's owner, Darwin Silva, to the building area, where Darwin displayed concern about the prison's purpose and heavily questioned Eddie about it. However, he cornered him against a ledge and explained that due to their contractual agreement, Warrenbach was legally obligated to construct the prison, ultimately pressuring Darwin into complying.

"Eddie has been working on new facilities here at the factory. We can’t tell you much about what he’s working on—he doesn’t always tell US much about it! But we're sure it will lead to great things!"
(Eddie M. N. Ritterman's entry in the Orientation Notebook)

In 1968, Eddie was diagnosed with Kennedy's disease. Therefore, he would have to periodically visit physicians over the coming decades.

Also in the late 1960s, Eddie was hired into the Playtime Company with the role of making deals with other companies to work with Playtime.[8] He later acquired an Omni-Hand, by which point he was the Head of Research.

In 1972, Eddie proposed a contract, which Darwin Silva signed on behalf of Warrenbach Construction. He would later propose another contract, which had a small clause saying that all directives given by Playtime Co. should be completed within the appropriate time. Darwin did not bother to read the contract, which later ended up contributing to him being threatened to be pushed off a cliff by Ritterman.

"The backbone of our flourishing business, Eddie prefers to keep his head down and work the numbers with minimal fanfare...—"

the quote from: Meet Your Leaders! - Pt. 1

Eddie Ritterman is an enigmatic figure within Playtime Co. who had a reputation of being a recluse, with not even the workers meeting or seeing him. From what is gathered, Eddie is a hardworking man who is responsible for keeping the shady dealings of Playtime Co. and the higher-ups a complete secret. Within the Incident Aftermath recording, Eddie speaks with a posh British accent and holds a professional tone as he attempts to calm down the angered Leith Pierre over the Theater Incident.

Although he is the Head of Research, very little is said about what he actually does in this role that pertains to research (aside from the Warrenbach Construction letter). It is possible that this role is just to hide his true role to lower ranking employees and he is responsible for other tasks in Playtime Co., or that he does research work off-screen. Most notably, is that when speaking to Darwin Silva, he does not call himself a scientist but a businessman.

Despite his professionalism and collected state of being, Eddie harbors an icy, ruthless streak, as seen in his conversation with Warrenbach's Darwin Silva. When Darwin got cold feet over building the Shelf, Eddie coldly reminded him about the terms of his contract - simultaneously calling his signature "the ugliest bit of cursive [he'd] ever seen" - and backed the man toward the ledge of an underground cliff, intimidating the construction manager into compliance.

born in 1946, March 6. 49 years old.

Eddie heads the research department at Playtime. Although he is slightly lower in rank than Leith Pierre, who is not only the head of the innovation department but also the company’s director, he is also one of the highest‑ranking individuals in the company’s hierarchy. His role at the factory is somewhat vague, and few people understand what he does in his department, and he doesn’t talk about it much. But in reality, the purpose of his work is to maintain the secrecy of the company’s projects, to close deals for the company, and to research everything related to the company’s profits. Apart from their concealment of experiments on children, where they turn them into toys on the lower floors of the laboratories using poppy gel made from poppy flowers. And these experiments are carried out in order to discover the secret of eternal life and to find a cure for world diseases (in his case, for his own disease as well)
Keeping secrets also involves getting rid of undesirable people by any means. That is, through brutal murders, which only high‑ranking company employees know about. For all the other lower‑level employees, the research department is just concerned with sales analytics, product profitability, and other boring stuff, so no one really wants to delve into the details. Moreover, Eddie was a mystery to all the employees.