Steve Rabin
Principal Lecturer
Steve Rabin earned a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science, both from the University of Washington. He lectured on game AI at the University of Washington for seven years and has been a principal lecturer at DigiPen since 2006, teaching undergraduate and masters-level game AI and data visualization courses.
Currently, Rabin is a principal software engineer at Nintendo Technology Development, where he researches new techniques for Nintendo’s current and future platforms, architects development tools such as the Nintendo CPU Profiler, and manages UX on Nintendo’s game development tools. Rabin holds 15 Nintendo-issued patents on data collection/analysis/visualization, Augmented Reality, and the Wii Remote. He has contributed to Nintendo’s NES, SNES, Game Boy, GameCube, DS, Wii, Wii U, 3DS, and Switch platforms, having worked at Nintendo for over 20 years. Before Nintendo, Rabin worked primarily as an AI engineer at several Seattle startups, including Gas Powered Games, WizBang! Software Productions, and Surreal Software.
Rabin has been a key figure in the game AI community for over 20 years, having organized and edited publications such as the Game AI Pro series, AI Game Programming Wisdom series, and Introduction to Game Development. He has also contributed as a writer to over 20 books on game development, including the Game Programming Gems series. Rabin has been an invited keynote speaker at several academic AI conferences, founded the AI Game Programmers Guild in 2008 (now including over 650 professional members worldwide), and founded the 2-day AI Summit at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), where he has been a summit advisor since 2009.
Selected Publications
- S. Rabin and N. Sturtevant, “Combining Bounding Boxes and JPS to Prune Grid Pathfinding,” AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2016.
- N. Sturtevant and S. Rabin, “Canonical Orderings on Grids,” International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2016.
Selected Game Credits
- Dungeon Siege, Microsoft (PC, 2002)
- Microsoft Baseball 3D, Micosoft (PC, 2000)
- HyperBlade, Activision (PC, 1998)