Between the groundbreaking student projects and award wins, major faculty milestones, big campus news, and alumni impact across the industry, DigiPen Dragons made 2025 one for the books. Here’s a look back at everything that defined DigiPen’s 2025.
Student Success
DigiPen students showcased their exceptional creativity and technical prowess across art, animation, sound, and game design in 2025. In the annual World of Warcraft Student Art Contest, MFA in Digital Arts student Drew Mitchell clinched the top prize in the Character Art category with his 3D “Crimson Dream Gorger,” while BFA in Digital Art and Animation student Sasha Ponomarenko earned Runner-Up in FX Art for her spell animation, “Chains of Regret.”
The 2D student film Mariposa, an allegorical tale about the emotional impact of dementia, was a 2025 Rookie Awards finalist for both 2D Animated Film of the Year and the People’s Choice Award. The animated short continued its hot streak by winning the festival-wide, cross-category Best Film award at the 2025 Kino Film Festival in Moscow, Idaho.
DigiPen game design students continued their history of winning performances at the 2025 GDC Student Narrative Analysis Competition, with Qi Ren Soo earning Platinum for his breakdown of PUBG: Battlegrounds, while his peers Noah Crissey, Abigail Scheidler, Josh Hao, and Connor Runyon took home Gold. In audio, the students behind polished action adventure game Shadow’s Grove won the Music Award at the inaugural G.A.N.G. Student Game Music & Sound Design Competition.
Student team Wise Reply presented the unique AI-powered dialogue system from their game Barton on a special panel talk for the Las Vegas LVL Up Expo, highlighting their innovative approach integrating ChatGPT into Unreal Engine to enable dynamic NPC interactions. To top it all off, DigiPen’s Steam page surpassed 14 million unique downloads in 2025, entertaining players around the world!
Campus Life
DigiPen’s campus life was a whirlwind of creativity, collaboration, and celebration in 2025. The year kicked off in January with the 2025 Global Game Jam, where DigiPen’s campus transformed into a hub for local developers putting together original games over a tight 48-hour timeline.
In April, DigiPen had the honor of hosting 17 leaders from Australia, Japan, and India, who visited campus as part of the U.S. Quad alliance to learn more about DigiPen’s innovative approach to STEM education. That same month, DigiPen’s NextGen event set a record for employer attendance, welcoming 127 representatives from 75 game and tech companies to campus to network with the graduating class.
At the annual DigiPen Student Showcase, students showed off the original games and animated films they spent all year crafting together. The event was followed by the brand new Playfest, a lively open house that allowed friends, family, and industry professionals to experience the student projects firsthand. The DigiPen Student Union also voted on their annual Student Life Excellence Awards, honoring campus community members who went above and beyond in making an impact, including student of the year, Emmy Berg. Shortly after, we said farewell to the incredible Class of 2025 at Commencement, sending them off to make waves in the game, tech, and interactive media industry.
In August, DigiPen made a major update to its Intellectual Property policy to empower students and alumni with ownership of their original college projects, providing them with greater opportunities to commercialize their work both in and out of school.
DigiPen also welcomed the incoming Class of 2025 in September, kicking off the new academic year with big dreams and ambitions! Now at the end of the first semester, students from all years aren’t slowing down and continue to make strong impressions at conventions like PAX West and at on-campus events like our annual Fall Career Summit. Seniors from our computer science programs also tackled joint research with our campus neighbors at General Robotics.
Faculty Accomplishments
In 2025, DigiPen faculty continued to push boundaries, debuting groundbreaking research and developing innovative curriculum to inspire the next generation of creators.
DigiPen MFA in Digital Arts Program Director Mark Henne debuted a photorealistic laparoscopic surgery simulator prototype, developed in Unreal Engine 5 for ParaSurgical Systems. Funded by an Epic Games MegaGrant, the project was the result of years of research collaboration between a dozen DigiPen faculty, MFA in Digital Arts students, and BFA in Digital Art and Animation students.
Lighting artist Morgan Rowe sat down with us to outline her unique journey from former DigiPen student to current DigiPen instructor with her new course, CG 391 Introduction to Lighting in Games with Unreal Engine.
Ola Amayri, Chair of DigiPen’s Department of Computer Science, helped lend her long history of humanitarian AI research in the refresh of DigiPen’s BS in Computer Science of Artificial Intelligence program. Program Director Barnabas Bede received the 2025 K.S. Fu Award for his contributions to the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society, a testament to his prominent research and expertise in the field of fuzzy systems.
Alumni Success
DigiPen Dragons have always gone on to have an outsized impact on the industry, and 2025 was no exception. We kicked off the year talking with Class of 2022 graduate Rhianna Pinkerton, who made her mark programming the award-winning Meta Quest 3 VR game, Batman: Arkham Shadow. Class of 2023 valedictorian Jozie Crump contributed her design chops to another award-winning superhero title, digital card game Marvel Snap. Speaking of superheroes, it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Amazon Prime Air’s new delivery drones! The futuristic new drones began delivering in select cities this year thanks in part to the work of Class of 2007 graduate Jonathan Wills, who helped develop the machine learning algorithms used to help them navigate.
Alumni made sizable contributions to some of the most anticipated games of 2025 as well. An impressive 16 DigiPen graduates at Sucker Punch worked on everything from art, audio, programming, design, and production on the critically-acclaimed ronin revenge epic, Ghost of Yotei. We talked more with Class of 2019 graduate and Sucker Punch producer Maria Bourg about working on the celebrated sequel to Ghost of Tsushima. We also caught up with fellow Class of 2019 alum Todd Alberda, whose environment art was all over Doom: The Dark Ages, a welcome left-turn for the classic FPS series that sent the Doomslayer into medieval territory. On the programming side, Class of 2021 alum Shareef Raheem tackled pipeline improvements and workflow optimization for the recently released Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
Graduates had a big impact in the world of film as well in 2025. Class of 2017 BA in Music and Sound Design graduate Evan Alderete served as the composer on two of the year’s most viral animated series, The Amazing Digital Circus and Hazbin Hotel. DigiPen MFA in Digital Arts graduate Francisco Guerrero contributed his character and color design skills to Adult Swim’s breakout hit series Common Side Effects, which earned a Primetime Emmy nomination and a rare perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. A crew of five Class of 2025 DigiPen BFA in Digital Art and Animation graduates put their newfound animation skills to quick work, helping DigiPen animation instructor Jazno Francouer produce a proof of concept for a proposed new feature film named Decoder Ring. Developed by Pencilish, a studio founded by ex-Disney Renaissance animators, the short premiered at LightBox Expo in October.
Here’s to all the amazing DigiPen accomplishments, awards, and innovation that awaits in 2026!