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ime was to be a game designer, all you needed was a computer and a basement or garage owned by your mother. The only education you needed to be a truly great game designer was a stack of Atari 2600 games and maybe a few issues of Popular Science magazine. Those days are done. If you want to be a game designer in the maturing market we have today, you need a lot more than your moms basement and some magazines. You need imagination, determination, and preferably a job with a major game publisher or an indie game developer. And before you can have any of those things, you just might need a formal education.
The Princeton Review serves as Americas standard for college preparation and admissions advice. Since 1981, it has been ranking colleges by programs, features, and financial aid packages as well as publishing guidebooks to college admissions. This year, theyve surveyed 50 different game design studies programs in the U.S. and Canada and have come up with the best of the best for a degree in video games. The eight schools on this list were selected by The Princeton Review as the top programs. Some offer only minor degrees or concentrations and some are undergraduate major programs. Some of them have been around since those early Atari days and a few of them only just started game design programs in the last few years. Go to any one of them, though, and youll be getting some of the best education out there for video game design.
The Princeton Review surveyed 50 collegiate game design programs and picked out the eight absolute best schools you can attend.

AJ Glasser

University of Southern California, Interactive Media Division
Website: http://interactive.usc.edu Location: Los Angeles, CA Degrees offered: Major/Minor Number of students enrolled: 16,283 Student/Faculty ratio: 9:1 Annual tuition: $38,570 The Interactive Media Division of USC has graduated some pretty big names in the indie gaming scene. Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany (flOw), Matt Korba and Paul Bellazza of The Odd Gentleman (The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom), and Justin Hall of GameLayers (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) all came up through Division and all almost immediately made games or have game studios of their own.

APRIL 2010

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DigiPen Institute of Technology
Drexel University, RePlay (Digital Media & Computer Science)
Website: www.digipen.edu Location: Redmond, WA Degrees offered: Major/Minor/Conc. Number of students enrolled: 883 Student/Faculty ratio: 23:1 Annual tuition: $476 per credit
Founded in 1998, DigiPen is one of the oldest game design programs in the country. Recent graduate Kim Swift (class of 2005) went on to develop the award-winning game, Portal at Valve Corporation before joining Airtight Games as project lead in December 2009. Google most influential women in the games industry, and youre sure to find her name on at least half a dozen lists from various publications.

Becker College, Game Design and Game Programming
Website: www.replay.drexel.edu Location: Philadelphia, PA Degrees offered: Major/Minor/Conc. Number of students enrolled: 13,139 Student/Faculty ratio: 9:1 Annual tuition: $29,800 Graduates from Drexel wind up in a variety of jobs across the games industry. You can find RePlay alumni in everything from animation to community management. Even before the gaming program was formalized, Drexel graduated two people who became big names in the games industry: Tom Fulp is known for creating both the game Alien Hominid and the Flash portal/gaming hotspot, Newgrounds.com; and Jack Wall composed award-winning music for Myst III: Exile and Myst IV: Revelation.
Website: www.becker.edu/gamedev Location: Worcester, MA Degrees offered: Major/Concentration Number of students enrolled: 103 Student/Faculty ratio: 39:1 Annual tuition: $23,725
Becker College is famous for its graduates outside the gaming communitypeople like Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton ginbut they hope to add gaming industry people to their lineup after graduating their very first class in the Game Design and Game Programming departments just last year. Already, some of their students are finding employment in the industry with studios like Blue Fang Games, which develops the award-winning Zoo Tycoon game series.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences
Website: www.gsas.rpi.edu Location: Troy, NY Degrees offered: Major/Minor/Conc. Number of students enrolled: 5367 Student/Faculty ratio: 14:1 Annual tuition: $38,100 Rensselaers graduate pool includes a lot of chief executive officers: Kathrik Bala is founder and CEO of Vicarious Visions, which developed several Guitar Hero Wii games among other well-known projects. His fellow RPI alumna Tobi Sauliner worked at Vicarious Visions for five years before going off to found and become CEO of 1st Playable Productionswhich handles Cartoon Networks Ben 10 and Secret Saturdays games for the Nintendo DS. More recent graduate Mike DelPrete is founder and CEO of Agora Games, an online game technology and community-building resource for many prominent games such as Guitar Hero and Call of Duty: World at War.
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Student: Profile

The Art Institute of Vancouver,
Game Art & Design/Visual & Games Programming
Worcester Polytechnic Institute,
Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD)
Website: www.artinstitutes.edu Location: Vancouver, BC (Canada) Degrees offered: Concentration Number of students enrolled: 1530 Student/Faculty ratio: N/A Annual tuition (GAD): $45,465 (interna-
tional); $39,375 (domestic) Annual tuition (VPG): $38,970 (international); $33,750 (domestic)
Though it is an art school, the GAD and VPG programs produce graduates in all kinds of video games industry jobs besides art design and animation. There are alumni in product development, production, game design, level design, and even a film instructor across a number of well known game development studios and film programs.
Website: http://imgd.wpi.edu/ Location: Worcester, MA Degrees offered: Major Number of students enrolled: 3160 Student/Faculty ratio: 14:1 Annual tuition: $36,890 Pretty much right across the street from Becker College, WPI has a friendly rivalry going for it in the college town of Worcester. Becker College, however, is more of a liberal arts-based school while WPI has a technical emphasisso it never gets too fierce. Some of its prominent alumni include Chris Dyl, chief technology officer at Turbine; Ichiro Lambe, principle designer at Dejobaan Games (whose most recent game, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, is nominated for an Independent Games Festival Award); and Mike Gesner, lead designer on Second Life.

Getting a Foot in

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Student Profile

the Door.
Website: http://gambit.mit.edu/ Location: Cambridge, MA Degrees offered: None (see below) Number of students enrolled: 4138 Student/Faculty ratio: 7:1 Annual tuition: $37,510 MIT doesnt offer a game-specific degree; it only has degrees in disciplines like computer science and media studies. Through these programs, however, students can access the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab to work with other schools in collaboration to create games. The other unique thing about MITs program is they teach students not to crunch by restricting their work on a full-time project to eight hours a day.
The Princeton Reviews complete list of undergraduate game design programs
The following 42 schools may not have made The Princeton Reviews top eightbut theyre all institutions that at least offer courses in video game design, if not full-blown degrees. For more information on these schools and links to their admissions sites, check out Your Guide to Game Design Programs on GamePro.com.
Adelphi University http://home.adelphi. edu/~stemkoski/ Amherst College https://www.amherst.edu/ Angelo State University http://angelo.edu/dept/ computer_science/ Arizona State University http://engineering.asu. edu/cidse/ Baker University http://www.bakeru.edu/ faculty/vkolesnikov/ Baylor University http://gaming.ecs.baylor. edu Case Western Reserve University http://www.case.edu Clarkson University http://www.clarkson.edu/ digitalarts Dartmouth College http://www.tiltfactor.org Full Sail University http://www.fullsail.edu Georgia Southern University http://bcook. cs.georgiasouthern.edu Hampshire College http://hampshire.edu/ lspector Indiana University, Bloomington http://www.iub.edu/ Lewis University http://cs.lewisu.edu Lycoming College http://www.lycoming.edu/ ComputerScience/
Lynchburg College http://cs.lynchburg.edu/ briggs Marshall University http://www.marshall.edu/ isat/cit/ Miami University http://aims.muohio.edu North Central College http://scr.csc.noctrl.edu Northern Michigan University http://www.nmu.edu/ admissions Oklahoma Christian University www.oc.edu/academics/ arts_sciences/art_design/ Old Dominion University http://www.ece.odu. edu/~yshen Pace University http://vulcan.seidenberg. pace.edu/~skevoulis/ Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Brooklyn http://bxmc.poly.edu/ Rice University http://www.cs.rice. edu/~jwarren Sacred Heart University www.sacredheart.edu/ gamedesign.cfm Stetson University www.stetson.edu/ academics/programs/121. php The College of New Jersey http://www.tcnj.edu/~imm The College of St. Scholastica http://www.css.edu/ x864.xml

The Ohio State University, Columbus http://www.cse.ohio-state. edu/graphics The University of Texas at Dallas http://iiae.utdallas.edu University of California, Riverside http://www.ucr.edu/ University of California, Santa Cruz http://ugrad.soe.ucsc.edu/ University of Delaware http://www.cis.udel.edu University of Denver http://www.du.edu/ University of Illinois at Chicago http://www.uic.edu/index. html/ University of Maryland, Baltimore County http://art.umbc.edu/varts/ faculty/mcdonald.php University of New Mexico http://agl.um.edu/games University of North Texas http://www.eng.unt.edu/ ian University of San Francisco http://web.usfca.edu/cs/ University of Utah http://www.eae.utah.edu University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point http://cnmtsrv4.uwsp.edu/