 Elonka Dunin is Executive Producer and General Manager of Online Community at Simutronics Corporation, and a founding member of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games SIG. Her company, Simutronics, was founded in 1987 in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a leading developer of online multiplayer games, ranked on the "Inc. 500" list as one of the fastest-growing companies in the country. One of the Simutronics games, GemStone, is the longest-running such game in the world, with a history that goes back over fifteen years. Simutronics has several games at its www.play.net service, including medieval fantasy games such as GemStone IV and DragonRealms, the modern-day mystery-adventure game Modus Operandi, the Greek mythology game Alliance of Heroes, and the award-winning 3-D action game CyberStrike. Simutronics is currently working on a new game for the graphical multiplayer arena, called Hero's Journey, and their game engine, HeroEngine is being licensed by many other companies which are using it to create their own MMORPGs.
Born in Los Angeles, Elonka studied Astronomy at UCLA, and then joined the United States Air Force. She was stationed at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom, and Beale Air Force Base in California, where she worked on the SR-71 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Along with her other achievements, Elonka is a world-traveler who speaks several languages, and has visited scores of countries around the world. She has visited every continent including Antarctica, which she traveled to in 1999. Her lifelong interest in cryptography became public when in 2000 she was awarded a prize for being the first person to crack the PhreakNIC Code, an up-until-Elonka unsolved puzzle created by the hacker group se2600. Since September 11th, Elonka has been helping out with the war on terrorism by teaching government agents about cryptography and what types of codes that Al Qaeda may be using. She is also one of the leaders of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack a code on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters, and led the international team that cracked the related KGB Cyrillic Projector Cipher in 2003. In 2006, she published a book of puzzles and codes, which was published internationally, as The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. Elonka is also an avid Wikipedian, having written or expanded over 250 articles on Wikipedia. And as a public speaker, Elonka regularly gives talks on her favorite subjects: Games, Wikipedia, and cryptography. |