SMU Guildhall


SMU Guildhall is a graduate video game development program located at the Southern Methodist University. It was one of the first graduate video game development programs in the United States. SMU Guildhall has claimed a Top 10 ranking for 15 years in a row in the Princeton Review's Top 25 Graduate Schools for Game Design, including . They were also ranked #1 in the world by .
SMU Guildhall offers over 100 graduate courses dedicated to game design, and is the only program of its kind with in all four cornerstones of gaming — Art Creation, Level Design, Production, and Software Development.
Students create a minimum of 3 — a 2D tablet game, a 3D multiplayer game, and a 3D original "capstone" game. Student capstone games are regularly published on Steam and Epic Game Store. Collectively, their games have received over a million downloads on and many have ranked in Steam's Top 100 Games.
Students have completed , which include independent research, development, and analysis on industry trends and topics, solving critical issues in order to demonstrate mastery of their specialized crafts and to fulfill stringent graduation requirements. Unity, Valve, Epic, Microsoft, Nintendo, Intel, Dell, Oculus Rift, and America’s Army have sponsored student research projects through grants, scholarships, and technology.

History

Originally located at the SMU's Plano, Texas facilities, Guildhall relocated to SMU's main campus in central Dallas at the for Research and Innovation in 2020. The master's program was from a specific request by gaming industry leaders in the United States, who saw a need in the industry to equip game creators with the skills required for the future.
The program has graduated 1100 , who have worked at 350 studios on hundreds of .
are all hired directly from industry, and have worked on more than 300 professional games at 40+ game studios.
Games, student projects, and research teams have also won awards including: Game Developers' Conference Game Narrative Review, Intel University Games Showcase, SMU Research Day, TechTitans Edge Computing Grand Challenge, Certain Affinity Portfolio Competition, MoMoCon Indie Game Competition, Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPrize, DICE Summit Intel Scholarship and Diversity Award and Randy Pausch Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Scholarship, SXSW Indie Gaming Competition, E3 College Game Competition, Red Bull Clash Course, HackTX, 20 over 20 Hackathon, Industry Giants Student Art and Animation Competition, GDC Online Narrative, Blizzard Entertainment's Student Art Contest, Indie Game Challenge, STEM Video Game Challenge, Independent Game Festival Competition, Intel Game Demo Contest, Texas Instruments DLP Products Next Generation Gaming Projectors Competition, and the Make Something Unreal “Educational Category”.
Over $10M in funding and awards including federal, plus biomedical, chemistry, and education journals and conferences. Guildhall research has been used for: , , and , , , , and .
SMU houses the , one of the fastest supercomputers in the nation, which is used for computational research.

Events