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 hotspots 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.