REDMOND, WA—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.

One '90s issue of Nintendo Power in particular put all of my dreams together on one page, profiling a place called Digipen, a slab of concrete not very far from Nintendo of America's offices in Redmond, Washington. It was touted as a proper place to learn how to make video games. It captured my imagination.

Ask anybody connected to the Digipen Institute of Technology—its faculty, its students, its alumni, and its fans—and they'll mention Nintendo Power, too. Nintendo partnered early on with the institute and used the shamelessly propagandistic magazine to enchant thousands of loyalists, whose starry-eyed visions of making their own Mega Men or Legends of Zelda suddenly had an endpoint.

It would be easy to laugh off my unfulfilled youthful dream by dismissing the school that happened to get a Nintendo Power plug as a relic of Nintendo's American dominance. That would be easy if Digipen had fallen to the wayside as a relic, a Nintendo-propped lark that started out unaccredited and graduated students who worked on forgotten games like Ridge Racer 64 and the Game Boy Color Bionic Commando game.

Clearly, the opposite happened. Digipen has graduated thousands of students who have gone on to work—and thrive—in jobs all over the industry. After opening in Vancouver in 1988, the institute moved to Redmond, where it eventually received Washington State accreditation in 1996 and national accreditation six years later. That was just in time to prepare a giant cast of programmers, artists, and animators for the PS2/Xbox era and beyond, when an explosion of AAA studios required a lot of young, talented flesh.

One of those studios, Valve, famously snapped up two award-winning Digipen student teams to work on two successive Portal games, putting Digipen on the international game development stage.

Since then, so many quality student games have come out of the school—including many game festival award recipients and nominees—that Digipen doesn't even hang photos or articles about Portal on its walls. Digipen used to crank out the kind of small-fry projects with artistic bents that were good as resume-builders for students. These days, the school is more likely to crank out polished, final products.

“In the oldest generation [of games], it was 'get in the basement, make a game,'” says Digipen founder and president Claude Comair. “Then, there were super productions. You needed companies like EA, Microsoft, or Nintendo to make these games. Now, with the advent of smartphones and online stores, anybody can publish a game.”

In a games industry where Steam, the App Store, and Kickstarter have exploded, you might expect its most well-known academy to adjust accordingly. Digipen faculty, students, and alumni, for better and for worse, would tell you otherwise. Welcome to Digipen, a games academy set to “hard” difficulty from the moment you walk in.

Welcome to game school

Digipen's 100,000 square foot campus doesn't look like a “video game academy.” At least, not the scare-quote kind. This isn't some Willy Wonka-styled factory of fun, nor a Chuck E. Cheese playland.

TV screens and posters celebrate prior graduates' games, and an arcade cabinet in the lobby plays student projects. Otherwise, the implications of the word “Institute” definitely apply. The place looks like a community college, seriously. From the outside, it's an unremarkable gray building whose giant windows are smothered in blinds. From the inside, it's all small lecture halls bathed in fluorescent lights and massive computer labs broken up by cubicle walls.

The first hint that this place is different comes from the couches. In my first hour at the school, at roughly 10am, I see two students passed out on them. And this is during the school's admittedly slower summer quarter.

“People are passed out on those at all times,” student Kevin Sheehan says. “At all times.”

The second hint about this school is that Sheehan has been assigned as my tour guide. Sheehan, who will enter this school year as a senior, has served similar student-guide duties for other journalists who have visited. Ask if you can "interview students," and Sheehan appears on a Digipen platter.

I put the question to him directly: Is he Digipen's trusty voicebox? Is this place like a penitentiary? He replies with his own question, as if to double-check: “Am I drinking the Kool-Aid so much that when someone comes through, I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a great school'? No, I'm objectively analytical.”

He doesn't mind getting a little press, anyway; he admits that he would like to get hired when he graduates. Sheehan's output at Digipen is press-worthy enough, including organizing Outbreak, a "live," team-based game on campus that he likens to D&D meeting paintball.

The 23-year-old Pennsylvania native talks at great length when asked about his experiences leading up to Digipen—designing mods in Timesplitters as a 12-year-old, then experimenting with more complicated mods for WarCraft III. Most other Digipen students I speak to have similar stories—not just Nintendo Power-styled dreams, they have specific attempts at tinkering with games in their youth, often without any prior coding experience.

By the end of high school, Sheehan's game design dreams collided with lawyer parents who insisted he go to a standard university and get a diploma. Sheehan settled on “a generic digital medium degree” at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Within two years, he was fed up.

“I sat down with someone [at Drexel] and said, 'I want to fine-tune my degree to focus on game design. What classes can I swap out with other classes?' They said, 'Honestly, none. We're not interested in giving you the degree that you really want. We're giving you the degree you signed up for.' I said, 'OK, time to leave.'”

An open-house visit to Digipen over the summer of 2010 convinced Sheehan that he should transfer, joining the school's then-nascent Bachelors of Game Design program. Beyond a sense of “community” and a course load that spoke to his game-design wishes, the fact that Portal wasn't listed or touted during the visit was a big selling point. “This said to me, we're not going to harp on only one or two success stories,” he says.