While in Seattle for the Nintendo Gamer's Summit, we also got a tour of the brand-spanking-new DigiPen facilities.

　　DigiPen, an independent college designed specifically to teach its students how to become video game programmers, recently relocated from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Redmond, Washington - conveniently just across the street from Nintendo of America's headquarters.

　　Though the six-year-old school had finally become accredited in Canada, and has yet to be accredited here, the move to the US where so many gaming companies are seemed best to all those involved.

　　With ten-hour days - and labs to attend on Saturdays - DigiPen students obviously must be very dedicated to learning their craft. And they seem to be. Talking to a few of them about their new game design we learned that one had given up a job as a finance professor at the University of Massachusetts, another had just completed his journalism degree at Northwestern, and that still another was merely living out his lifelong 18-year-old dream.

　　And judging from the grading standards, the force of a lifelong dream may just be what it takes to get through the courses: "In order to remain in the program of study, students must achieve a minimum of 50 percent average in each of the compulsory courses," the catalog for the Academic Year 1998-1999 states (along with a note that all absences must be approved by the CEO of the institution - no casual cuts allowed here).

　　Even though the school appears strict and intensely time-consuming (no keggers here), DigiPen President Claude Comair proudly announced that for the 40 spots available in the semester that began January 12, he sent out 25,000 applications.

　　Something somewhere must be working.