Joe Kaminkow, the renowned game designer, has been named in the EKG Slot Awards Hall of Fame will be honoured. He will be ceremonially inducted into the hall of fame at a ceremony at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.
The EKG Slot Awards, organised by Eilers and Krejcik Gaming, has decided to honour Kaminkow for his long and fruitful career in video games. He started his career by installing video games in the late 1970s in Massachusetts while still in college. After graduation, he stepped into designing games for video and for pinball on behalf of Williams Electronics.
In the mid-1980s he partnered with Gary Stern to launch Data East Pinball and they gained licences to make games under the names of Robocop, Back to the Future, The Simpson, Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, Lethal Weapon 3, Jurassic Park and Star Wars. When Sega bought Data East, Kaminkow was appointed vice president of game design.
He is already in the Pinball Hall of Fame in 2004, but after a career designing casino games, he returned to partner Stern to make the Beatles pinball. It was in 1999 that Kaminkow went into casino slots with IGT. He played a key part in a number of popular titles such as Back to the Future, Sex and the City, Hangover, Ghostbusters, the Price is Right, and Wheel of Fortune.
