This isn't your typical college.

Classrooms and labs provide places to learn, but the coursework, math-intensive as it is, finds its target. Hundreds of students fill seats in front of long rows of computers, focusing laser like on one goal: to soak up the knowledge and cultivate the creativity it takes to program a video game that the next generation of gamers will refuse to put down.

The DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond grants undergraduate and graduate degrees in video game development. It also is helping transform the Seattle area into one of the nation's leading game-development regions.

"There is no dabbling here," says Raymond Yan, senior vice president of operations for DigiPen.

U.S. video game software sales for both computers and game systems increased 6 percent from 2005 to 2006 to a total of $7.4 billion, and sales have almost tripled since 1996, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Although exact numbers are not available, few doubt that the growth rate of the industry has been far more rapid in Washington state.

But the story of the region's rise as a temple for video game developers doesn't start with DigiPen, or even Microsoft Corp. or Nintendo of America Inc., although they now play perhaps the most important and visible roles. It starts with the Boeing Co.

That's right, the airplane company.

Boeing helped grow a middle class in the Northwest in the 1970s and '80s. White-collar parents bought their children the earliest home computers and game consoles, such as the California-bred Atari 2600. The region's frequent rainfall helped, too, making indoor play necessary and a joystick to thumb paramount.

"Everybody who worked at Boeing who was an engineer bought their kids computers, Atari 800s and Apple IIs," says Jason Robar, who grew up in the Seattle area an Atari devotee. "You had this kind of upper-middle-class, middle-middle-class wave of homes buying computers in the 1980s."

Some of those kids, such as Robar, not only escaped the rain and immersed themselves in the emerging video game culture, but later helped advance it by going to work for the industry. "I want to do that, I can do that better," Robar recalls thinking about his early experiences with video games. He did both, going on to help Microsoft build up Windows and to help the software giant crack the video game market.

If financially capable households helped build the cultural framework for a game industry, then Microsoft, Nintendo and now DigiPen keep it growing and churning, spinning off game development companies and feeding the brains needed to think up new games and to mold those visions into sellable products.

As a result, Puget Sound is well-positioned to help satiate a national hunger for video games that grows like a super-powered Pac-Man. And it's no longer just about gluing kids to their computer screens: 67 percent of American heads of households play computer and video games. "What research has shown is that kids who grew up on games become teenagers who continue to play games and become adults who play games," says Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.

This bodes well for the Puget Sound market, Della Rocca says, which is one of the top three or four places for game development in the United States, competing with hot spots such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In August, the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, one of the largest annual gatherings in the video game world, attracted an estimated 30,000 attendees. And in October, Seattle for the first time played host to the World Cyber Games, the global video game tournament and culture festival. The event attracted representatives of more than 70 countries.

In the past year, the number of local game developers has ballooned to 70, nearly double the 37 in 2003. The companies, some of them tucked away in leafy suburbs, have produced some of the most well-known titles for personal computers and game consoles. The titles alone feed a gamer's fantasies: "Guild Wars Nightfall" by Bellevue-based ArenaNet; "F.E.A.R." by Kirkland-based Monolith Productions; and "Justice League Heroes" by Bothell based Snowblind Studios.

Some of the companies are independent and helped pave the way early on, such as Bellevue based Valve Corp., founded in 1996 by a former Microsoft employee. The company's portfolio includes the blockbuster first-person shooter "Half-Life," which PC Gamer Magazine named Best PC Game Ever in November 1999. Other companies are wholly owned subsidiaries, like ArenaNet, which focuses on developing multiplayer, online games and is owned by Korea-based NCsoft Corp. In ArenaNet's "Guild Wars: Eye of the North," the appeal of gaming is abundantly clear. In that game, you return "to the battle- scarred continent of Tyria," where "old friends await, ready to help you settle past scores." Who could argue with that?

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Kirkland-based Bungie Studios released the third installment of the wildly popular "Halo" series, which some credit with single handedly making the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles worth buying. With Bungie spinning off Oct. 1, the roster of independent developers in Washington has an influential new addition. And the region is a leader in the emerging and fast-growing casual games business, Della Rocca says, a $1.5 billion market that includes women in their late 30s and early 40s who play on an average personal computer. For example, Seattle- based PopCap Games Inc. created the online puzzle game "Bejeweled," which has led to more than 12 billion hours of game-play since 2001. Also, the region, by being the home of Nintendo's American headquarters, gets a front-row seat to the market power of Nintendo's Wii, which is capturing record market share, selling 9 million units in September.

By some estimates, the Wii, which retails for $250, is outselling Microsoft's Xbox 360, which recently cut its price to $350. To the benefit of local game developers, Della Rocca says, the Wii's popularity has opened new markets and intensified the competition to create more and better games, which drive and often subsidize console sales. For example, the success of the Wii prodded Microsoft to add family friendly games for its Xbox 360 and spurred Sony to cut the price of its high-end PlayStation 3 and prepare its own lineup of Wii-like games.

The growing market for family-friendly games isn't lost on local developers, which have historically focused on hard-core gamers, designing and marketing increasingly immersive experiences in which to blow stuff up. For example, Redmond-based Gas Powered Games, the creator of hit titles such as "Dungeon Siege" and "Supreme Commander," plans to exploit the inroads made by the Wii. The company's CEO, Chris Taylor, says the Wii "is another strong indicator in the new trend towards simpler games that are fun to play without the baggage of learning complex tutorials" or developing lightning-fast thumb reflexes. "It changes a lot of our old assumptions, and we'll develop new titles that reflect this trend," Taylor says.

Although the Northwest is home to a vibrant game industry, it has gotten little formal notice from government and business leaders. There has never been, for example, a study of the economic impact of the industry, although such studies have been done on just about every other industry.

Kristina Hudson, interactive media case manager for enterpriseSeattle, the lead economic development organization for Seattle and King County, says that's because many regard games as the silly purview of pimply-faced teenagers. But Hudson, who enjoys role-playing games like "Fable" for the Xbox, knows better. She has informally tracked local game developers over the years, including as an employee of the state Department of Community Trade and Economic Development. A local video game historian of sorts, she points out that, while Puget Sound harbors most of Washington's game developers, Spokane-based Cyan Inc., founded in 1987, shined a serious light on Washington early on when it released the groundbreaking title "Myst" in 1993, followed by its sequel, "Riven," both of which are among the best-selling computer games in history. "They developed a game that was so engaging and beautiful," she says. "You had teenagers playing it, you had adults playing it."

Hudson says video game developers are important to the economy because they employ highly skilled workers in high-wage jobs and cultivate the kinds of skills that are transferable to other fields, such as health sciences and the military. In October, Hudson presented preliminary results from the first ever study to measure the economic impacts of the local video game industry, in which the number of companies has quadrupled since the mid-1990s.