Spotlight on our new Games Design BSc programme

During lesson time you’ll be designing, creating and coding. But what about the gaming community at Surrey outside of your timetable? 

Gaming is a passion for many of us in Music and Media. So much so, that we built a replica of our Performing Arts Technology Studios (PATS) in Minecraft at the end of lockdown. For fun. Every April, our tech-mad technicians host a Mario Kart tournament, pitting 64 students against each other in the Green Room of Wates House, our on-campus pub. If you don’t win the coveted first place trophy, there are still the runner-up prizes to race for; second place gets a banana, third place a mushroom, and our lowest scorer takes home a wooden spoon!

Can you hit the high notes of Benson Boone or carry off a convincing Lola Young? If Italian plumbers on go carts isn’t your thing, the end of Semester Two also means time for a major SingStar competition. 

High societies

Our friends at the Surrey Video Gaming Society (SVGS) meet to game every Thursday in The Basement. They host i48Hr LAN parties (which are their biggest, not-to-be-missed events of the year!), gaming tournaments, esports viewing parties, socials and other gaming themed events. If you’re a fan of Rocket League, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, League of Legends or Cargo, they also compete in the National University Esports League (NUEL), and the British University Esports Championship (BUEC), hosted by National Student Esports (NSE). Taking a break from screens, our GameSoc society regularly runs Magic the Gathering, Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons sessions.

Step across the road from PATS, and students studying the ‘Writing for Gaming’ module regularly go on field trips to anime and gaming conventions as part of their course. 

Our new Games Design Programme Director, Jon, has already been making his mark, showcasing his own games designs at the Guildford Games Festival at G-live earlier this year –  an event you can look forward to experiencing firsthand in the future.

We collaborate with the Games and Innovation Nexus (GAIN) Programme too – joining the Global Game Jam back in January to build a playable video game against the clock in just 48 hours. 

Plus, we dusted off our retro consoles for a huge networking event in the Games Innovation Zone — a dedicated space on campus for playing, testing and developing Games – showcasing classic consoles from Super Mario World on the SNES, Sonic on the Sega Mega Drive to Halo on the Xbox. 

Our connections to the gaming industry are totally retro: going all the way back to the '90s when Surrey’s Research Park was home to pioneering early game developers like Bullfrog. Today, this legacy is thriving. The Park is still home to major gaming and CreaTech studios like Seven League Software (7SL), 22 Cans, Boris FX, as well as up and coming independent developers at Rocketdesk – a co-working hub for creating games, developing apps, editing video and building websites. 

This is only the beginning. As our Games Design degree welcomes its first cohort, the possibilities for more events and opportunities you’d like to see are endless.