The Company

Team

The Cryptic Studios management team has a solid, proven track record of leading the development of games and technologies that appeal to hardcore gamers and the mainstream audience.

Jack Emmert
Chief Executive Officer
Jack Emmert is a longtime gamer and comic book aficionado. His first foray into gaming was, of course, Dungeons & Dragons®. His professional career in the hobby game industry started at a comic book store in the outskirts of Philadelphia, Showcase Comics. He earned his first Master's degree (Ancient History) from the University of Chicago, and his second Master's degree from Ohio State University. During this period Jack also wrote supplements for a variety of gaming lines, including Deadlands, Hell on Earth, DC Universe and Marvel Superheroes. He left academia in July 2000 to co-found Cryptic Studios and design the hit MMOG City of Heroes and City of Villains.
Craig Zinkievich
Chief Operating Officer
Craig studied interdisciplinary science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he focused on mathematics, biology, literature and art. After graduating in 1993, he began his career as a software programmer for MapInfo, where he specialized in application software. It wasn't until much later that Craig found his true calling at Cryptic Studios, where he successfully tackled a number of crucial tasks. He was one of the designers of City of Heroes, and as a producer for City of Heroes and City of Villains and Executive Producer for Star Trek Online, Craig guided Cryptic's titles to highly successful launches by leveraging his deep knowledge and technical experience. In his role as Chief Operating Officer, Craig oversees development and production of Cryptic's projects.
Stephen D'Angelo
Chief Technical Officer

Stephen D'Angelo brings both technical and leadership skills to Cryptic Studios. A graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Stephen began his career as a programmer for multimedia systems at IBM and distributed computing systems at Sun Microsystems. He then moved on to Active Software and webMethods where he led teams building world class middleware integration and business-to-business software. He then led the team building distributed databases at Composite Software. At Cryptic, Stephen provides leadership to the software team. He also applies his wealth of experience in high performance, distributed, mission critical systems to the development and operation of online games.

Daniel Stahl
Executive Producer, Star Trek Online

Daniel boasts a rich gaming history, running the gamut from tabletop to console and online games. In addition to designing the board game Pirates Cove, he was an online producer at Wizards of the Coast, where he managed development for the Star Wars: TCG and MagicTheGathering.com websites. He later helped launch both the Xbox 360 and Zune at Microsoft. He came to Cryptic Studios in 2008 to work on Champions Online and Star Trek Online. He became Star Trek Online's Executive Producer in 2010 and was named the No. 1 mover and shaker by Massively.com in the same year.

Rob Overmeyer
Rob Overmeyer
Executive Producer, Champions Online: Free For All

Rob’s passion for gaming has been a driving force in his career, constantly pushing him to create games that are fun to play, tell great stories and allow players to be who they want to be. A fan of RPG’s and comics, Rob found his calling in the MMORPG universe of Champions Online: Free for All. After studying sociomusicology in college and parlaying his love for music into demo production and PR for local bands, he joined Cryptic Studios in 2003 to help launch City of Villains and has been a part of the Champions Online team since day one. In 2011, Rob became Executive Producer for Champions Online: Free for All and has worked tirelessly to expand and mature the game.