LOS ANGELES — The University of Southern California has one of the top game design programs in the country. The school’s Advanced Games class consists of big student teams who are building games from idea to completion over the course of a full academic year.
USC games
Mike Zyda, head of the GamePipe Laboratory at USC Games, invited me to visit Advanced Games class to see seven works in progress at the point where all of them had working demos. I was stunned to see just how advanced these games are. They’re being built by teams that range in size from 15 to 60 students. (See our story on the game program here).
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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