DigiPen Dragons

The DigiPen dragon is courageous, intelligent, innovative, magical, and creative, just like our student.

Marshal Traverse, Dean of Students

Call of Duty, inFAMOUS, Assassin’s Creed, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto, The Sims … a bunch of game titles that do ring a bill. What if we told you that the brains behind these games are DigiPen University graduates?

DigiPen Institute of Technology isn’t your typical college. It is the first university in the world to specialize in video game education with 3 campuses in the USA, Singapore and Spain. For over 27 years, DigiPen has been setting the grounds for young game lovers to profession in the video game industry alongside other sectors (aeronautics, automotive, cinema…) using an extremely practical education model in which students build video games and animations from scratch.

DigiPen is the first school in the world since 1996 to offer a bachelor’s degree in game development. It ranks the third in “The Princeton Review’s” list of top game design schools in North America. 53 Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards have been awarded to 40 DigiPen students since 2001 making a total of 174 awards including those recognizing game projects and academic papers.

DigiPen’s degree programs encourage a deep, fundamental understanding of the underlying concepts of game development. The curriculum is more than just theories; instead of just being taught how to use the tools and why, the student is being involved in the actual production and development. DigiPen’s programs teach the foundational principles of programming, design, art and animation preparing students to become innovators rather than just users of technology. This depth of knowledge is reflected within DigiPen graduates exceling in careers both inside and outside the games industry.

Students work on year-long group projects where they create fully playable games from scratch, including the art assets, artificial intelligence, and even the game engine itself! Adding to that, DigiPen’s website records show that a total of 3.3M time visitors have downloaded students’ games from its website. Graduates have shipped more than 1000 commercial games and have been hired by more than 300 companies.

Furthermore, DigiPen’s close links with the games industry, government bodies, and local communities ensure that the curriculum is constantly relevant and up-to-date. These connections have also led to more placement opportunities for students through networking, internships, and career fairs.

DigiPen graduates currently occupy positions at top developers throughout the games industry, including Valve, Bungie, Blizzard, Microsoft, Nintendo, and many more. Most notably, DigiPen students provided the foundation of the critically-acclaimed first-person puzzle games Portal and Portal 2, which incorporate elements of the award-winning DigiPen student games Narbacular Drop and Tag: The Power of Paint.

It takes a lot of hard work to become a DigiPen Dragon, but once there … you’ll reap the benefits and rewards with a huge satisfaction.

Dial our office digits to set a meeting and get to know more about this fascinating institute. We’ll assist happily.

Alaa Jishi

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