Gaming college still going strong after a quarter of a century

In my teenage years, I knew with utter certainty what I wanted to do after high school. I wanted to go to video game college.

Like many Nintendo-era addicts, I had spent my late ’80s/early ’90s childhood believing that I was a gaming master. High scores, Street Fighter victories, and even a win at one of those Blockbuster Video regional gaming tournaments proved my dominance in a vacuum devoid of the YouTube playthroughs and Xbox Live leaderboards. At school, I would draw game concept storyboards on the backs of worksheets, sketching level layouts and imagining fluid animations. While waiting for my mother at the grocery store, I would crack open plastic baggies so I could read magazines like GamePro and Nintendo Power cover-to-cover, as if I were keeping up with required curriculum in a surreptitious, Good Will Hunting sort of way.