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Elonka Dunin
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Elonka Dunin
Elonka Dunin (/ɪˈlɒŋkə ˈdʌnɪn/; born December 29, 1958) is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.
Dunin has published a book of exercises on classical cryptography, and maintains cryptography-related websites about topics such as Kryptos, a sculpture at the Central Intelligence Agency containing an encrypted message, and another on the world's most famous unsolved codes. She has given several lectures on the subject of cryptography, and according to the PBS series NOVA scienceNOW she is "generally considered the leading Kryptos expert in the world." In 2010, bestselling author Dan Brown named a character, Nola Kaye, in his novel The Lost Symbol after her, in an anagram pattern.
Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist at UCLA.
Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School, and then enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA, but dropped out near the end of her freshman year.
Dunin joined the United States Air Force, working as an avionics technician at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom and Beale Air Force Base in California. After choosing not to re-enlist, she studied digital electronics at Yuba College—a two-year community college—but did not obtain a degree.
In the 1980s, she became involved with the growing BBS culture. In 1989, while she was working as a temporary legal secretary in Los Angeles, this interest overlapped into the early multiplayer games, such as British Legends on CompuServe and Simutronics' GemStone II on GEnie.
In 1990, Dunin moved to St. Louis and began working for the online game company Simutronics. Simutronics launched its own website, play.net, in 1997 with Dunin as General Manager of Online Games, managing Simutronics' online community. Dunin was the product manager for GemStone III, executive producer for the Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess-based multiplayer game Alliance of Heroes, and worked in a variety of production and development roles on most of Simutronics' other products, including CyberStrike, Modus Operandi, DragonRealms, HeroEngine, Fantasy University, and Tiny Heroes. She is a founding member of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games SIG and edited four of their annual White Papers on various aspects of the online game industry, such as "Web and Downloadable Games" and "Persistent Worlds."
Dunin held a variety of production and development roles during her 24 years at Simutronics. Games that she worked on include:
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Elonka Dunin
Elonka Dunin (/ɪˈlɒŋkə ˈdʌnɪn/; born December 29, 1958) is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.
Dunin has published a book of exercises on classical cryptography, and maintains cryptography-related websites about topics such as Kryptos, a sculpture at the Central Intelligence Agency containing an encrypted message, and another on the world's most famous unsolved codes. She has given several lectures on the subject of cryptography, and according to the PBS series NOVA scienceNOW she is "generally considered the leading Kryptos expert in the world." In 2010, bestselling author Dan Brown named a character, Nola Kaye, in his novel The Lost Symbol after her, in an anagram pattern.
Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist at UCLA.
Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School, and then enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA, but dropped out near the end of her freshman year.
Dunin joined the United States Air Force, working as an avionics technician at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom and Beale Air Force Base in California. After choosing not to re-enlist, she studied digital electronics at Yuba College—a two-year community college—but did not obtain a degree.
In the 1980s, she became involved with the growing BBS culture. In 1989, while she was working as a temporary legal secretary in Los Angeles, this interest overlapped into the early multiplayer games, such as British Legends on CompuServe and Simutronics' GemStone II on GEnie.
In 1990, Dunin moved to St. Louis and began working for the online game company Simutronics. Simutronics launched its own website, play.net, in 1997 with Dunin as General Manager of Online Games, managing Simutronics' online community. Dunin was the product manager for GemStone III, executive producer for the Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess-based multiplayer game Alliance of Heroes, and worked in a variety of production and development roles on most of Simutronics' other products, including CyberStrike, Modus Operandi, DragonRealms, HeroEngine, Fantasy University, and Tiny Heroes. She is a founding member of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games SIG and edited four of their annual White Papers on various aspects of the online game industry, such as "Web and Downloadable Games" and "Persistent Worlds."
Dunin held a variety of production and development roles during her 24 years at Simutronics. Games that she worked on include:
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