Intel event highlights college student games that should be published right now

One of the delightful surprises at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was the Intel University Games Showcase, which featured some of the most innovative games being built by teams of college students.

I attended the event in the vast upper level of the Metreon and was very pleasantly surprised at how good the demos looked. Intel used a good method to screen the games. Intel host Randi Rost said the company asked game design program faculty at universities to provide a single entrant that represented the best game being developed by students at the school. It received entries from 11 schools with established video game programs, and the result was some very original work. I’ll summarize some of them in this story. But my basic message is that a lot of these games should find a publisher right away. They’re that good.