LOS ANGELES (December 9, 2025) – Today, North America’s No. 1 collegiate game design program, USC Games, announced its 10th annual USC Games Expo will return to USC’s campus on May 12, 2026. The USC Games Expo, the largest university-run gaming showcase in the world, will spotlight the work of students who are shaping the future of interactive entertainment. The 2026 Expo will be supported by Wemade, the pioneering global game developer and publisher behind the Legend of Mir series and a leader in MMORPG and blockchain gaming innovation.
“The USC Games Expo is the highlight of our year, giving our students the opportunity to showcase the games they’ve poured their creativity, talent, and dedication into,” said Danny Bilson, chair of the USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media & Games Division and director of USC Games. “As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Expo in 2026, we reflect on a decade of innovation and collaboration that has helped define USC Games as a leader in interactive entertainment education. We’re proud to welcome Wemade as a partner, whose support reinforces our shared commitment to nurturing the next generation of game creators.”
The 2026 USC Games Expo will kick off with the USC Games Advanced Games Projects (AGP) Spotlight Show, where 10 student-developed titles from USC’s premier capstone course will take center stage. As the culminating experience of the USC Games curriculum, AGP immerses student teams in a professional studio environment, challenging them to pitch, develop, refine, and launch original titles. The 2026 featured titles include:
Aftertaste
Aftertaste is a surreal 3D adventure side-scrolling
Baacadia
Baacadia is a 3D exploration game where you guide a flock of friendly Cloudfens—fluffy alien sheep—across a broken planet in need of healing. As a recorder robot built to capture and replay sounds, you will discover how your audio toolkit shapes the world around you. Watch your flock respond to each frequency. See flora bloom and fauna stir. Learn what this alien landscape remembers. No combat. No failure. Just sound, observation, a world that responds to every sound you play, and wool.
B.L.U.E.
B.L.U.E. is a multiplayer engineering combat sandbox set in deep space. Build your own ships with modular parts, shape their behavior through real physics, and take them into battles where every force, collision, and failure is accurately simulated. Use intuitive engineering tools to design engines, structures, and systems that actually work in an experience where every design choice matters. Experiment with mass, balance, thrust, durability, and more. Whether you enjoy building, competing, or experimenting, B.L.U.E. lets you bring your imagined spacecraft to life and watch them fly!
Glorgo’s Microplastics Mine
Glorgo’s Microplastics Mine is an absurd, eccentric, incremental resource manager that puts the player in the shoes of an overworked, underpaid middle-manager.
Lucky Duckies
Grab a friend and dive into Lucky Duckies, a delightfully goofy co-op 3D puzzle-platformer that mixes bouncy movement, water-spray hijinks, and over-the-top bath-time chaos. As two rubber duck parents, you’ll team up to rescue stranded ducklings across an overflowing bathroom, working together to spin water wheels, raise platforms, and launch each other through bubbly obstacle courses that will have you quacking up. Pick your duck, grab a controller, and get your ducks in a row for the bubbliest co-op adventure of your life!
Masterworks of Horror: Lovecraft’s Gambit
Bring your favorite stories to life using the works of legendary horror authors and become the genre’s greatest wordsmith in Masterworks of Horror: Lovecraft’s Gambit. Collect cards and build fully-customizable decks of literary mash-ups to best your opponent in this real-time card game battler. Do you have what it takes to embody horror’s most celebrated authors and create your own Masterwork?
Move, Move, Melon
Move, Move, Melon is a whimsical 3D on-rails collection game. Play as Melon, a hamster racing through snack-filled levels on her toy-ice cream maker to make the biggest scoop the world has ever seen! This evolution of a ‘runner’ game is a handcrafted, joy-filled escape, where every stage bursts with surprise and charm. Dive in, replay, and rediscover the fun every time!
Sisyphus’s Worst Day Ever
Sisyphus’s Worst Day Ever is a mischievous 3D puzzle game for clever strategists and fans of dark humor. Instead of solving for escape, you cleverly orchestrate an endless cycle of loops, ensuring Sisyphus always finds himself one step away from freedom—and somehow, always back at square one. As Zeus’s newest intern, you’ll engineer delightfully twisted contraptions and mind-bending scenarios, turning every hill into an inescapable carousel of frustration. With each level, Sisyphus comes so close to breaking the cycle, only to be spun right back where he started.
Stitchlings
Stitchlings is a couch co-op, top-down, hack-and-slash game where the enemies you defeat become parts to stitch onto your character. Play as a plush doll in a miniature world made of arts and crafts, battling dust bunnies and toy amalgamations. Grab a friend, discover the secrets of this haunted patchwork world, and find your place in it…together!
THE UNREALTOR
Welcome home to THE UNREALTOR — a co-op puzzle adventure game where you and a friend are Maya and Noah, future roommates trapped in a house tour that spirals into a shifting maze of impossible architecture. To escape this house-tour-from-hell, you’ll
Following the AGP Spotlight Show, Expo attendees, including USC students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the public, will have the opportunity to play more than 60 games created by students across the USC Games program. The Expo will also feature interactive installations from USC’s renowned Themed Entertainment program, as well as an exciting esports tournament. Additionally, guests can preview new titles developed in the 2026 Games as a Service and Live Operations (GLO) course, a first-of-its-kind academic class that focuses on the “live” component of game development, using PUBG MOBILE’s World of Wonder platform.
About USC Games
USC Games is a flagship collaboration offered jointly by the School of Cinematic Arts Division of Interactive Media & Games and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science. This unified brand allows press, industry, students, and faculty to discuss the overall efforts at USC in games and simultaneously clarify the important distinctions between the offerings of the various programs.
The program has been ranked No. 1 for twelve years, as evaluated by the Princeton Review. The program at the School of Cinematic Arts focuses on both the design and production of interactive media and games. Students emerge as creative media leaders, fluent in many forms of visual expression and storytelling, with a sophistication to design and develop innovative interactive experiences that expand the state of interactive art and play across domains, such as entertainment, education, health care, and social action.
The Computer Science Games program at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering provides students with a grounding in the fundamentals of computer science and a cross-disciplinary background in game development. Students emerge with an engineering-oriented game-programming skillset, with an understanding of key technologies and the ability to lead complex technical teams in the development of games.
In addition to the advanced games class, USC Games offers the USC Games Expo and an annual industry event held at the Game Developers Conference. USC Games brings more shared courses under this umbrella, including those from other schools at USCgames@usc.edu.
