Winning video game creation nets Santa Rosa man's team $100,000

<p>Brian Lee, 23, of Santa Rosa has loved video games since he was very young, and it's paid off.</p><p>Lee is a member of a college team that last week won the inaugural Indie Game Challenge for video game creation in the non-professional category, at a conference in Las Vegas and will now share a $100,000 prize with four of his classmates.</p><p>A 2004 graduate of Cardinal Newman High School, Lee designed the character, graphics and music for the game “Gear,” which was the Grand Prize Winner.</p><p>Lee is a junior at Digipen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash,, where he is studying coding for video games. He intends to pursue a career in graphic programming.</p><p>Digipen shares a building with Nintendo. Some of the institute's faculty are current or former employees for the gaming company, or for nearby Microsoft.</p><p>One of the first things Lee intends to do with his share of the winnings is to replace his 2005 computer, a comparative dinosaur.</p><p>“I'm probably going to buy a new laptop for programming at school and a Playstation 3 since I may be programming games for it in the future. I'll keep the rest around for getting through my last year of school,“ he said Monday.</p><p>Lee has always liked video games, since he was a tiny boy.</p><p>“We're convinced he taught himself to read so he could figure out how to play Mario Brothers,” said his mother, Peggy Lee, a registered nurse in the oncology department of Santa Rosa Kaiser.</p><p>Lee's father, Jim, also works for Kaiser, as a physician in internal medicine.</p><p>“I believe I was playing (video games)when I was three,” Brian said, adding “I don't know that there's a whole lot of reading in Mario Brothers.”</p><p>Growing up, his parents said he had an interest in science and music and played keyboards and piano.</p><p>He used some of his music background to create the soundtrack for “Gear,” described as a two-dimensional game in which the player controls a robot with the ability to change its hand into a gear. The player has to swing around sockets, ride on rails, swim and even rotate the world in order to get through ten unique levels and beat the “boss.”</p><p>A preview of the game can be seen at indiegamechallenge.com. It can be downloaded for free at b-lee.net/gear.</p><p>The event in Las Vegas was sponsored by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, Game Stop Corp. and The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University.</p><p>More than 250 entries were received for the contest.</p><p>The winning entries were announced at the conclusion of the Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain Summit at Red Rock Resort and Casino.</p><p>“All finalists got a meeting with publishers and developers,” Lee said, adding that the Grand prize win may lead to internships and job opportunities for the team members when they graduate.</p><p>“It's nothing concrete, but I have a big stack of business cards,” he said.</p>