Full Sail Stories

From an early age, Alejandro García-Tuñón was influenced by the world of video gaming. “Video games were just always around. My brother would get games for Christmas, and I would be the one to play them. Eventually, I started asking for my own.”

By high school, Alejandro was exploring multiple career paths, developing his skills in programming, music composition, and comedy. “I loved music, I loved video games, and I loved comedy. And so, after school and after work, I was part of an improv troupe. Meanwhile, I was learning computer science just because I loved it…I liked writing music at the time as well.”

As he worked to narrow his focus, Alejandro considered offerings from several Florida universities, including Full Sail’s Recording Arts program. “The Recording Arts degree at Full Sail was like, ‘Okay, approaching music and audio from a technical perspective – that's totally something I could do,’” he recalls. But something still wasn’t clicking. That’s when an advertisement for a new degree program launching at Full Sail caught his eye.

“I said, ‘Oh, wait a second. So you can make games and that's programming, which is something I'm already doing. And that seems like a much more stable path than comedy performance.’ So I started looking into it and everything just started aligning for that path.”

After graduating from Full Sail’s Game Development  (formerly Game Design & Development) bachelor’s program, Alejandro was eager to get his career in video games rolling. “I wanted to work at every place, even places I didn't want to work at. I was just looking for the first thing,” he recalls.

Alejandro soon got his break, landing a role as a junior engineer with Vicarious Visions, where he would go on to work on popular titles, including Guitar Hero III and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

“I was playing the first Guitar Hero while at Full Sail,” Alejandro recalls. “I saw it in a magazine and said, this looks amazing… [At Vicarious] we got the Wii port of Guitar Hero III. And I said, ‘I want to work on the audio for Guitar Hero.’ It felt very much like a full circle moment where I got to use some of this background I have in music and pull it into my new passion and my new career.”

From Vicarious, Alejandro would go on to work as a Lead Programmer at Darkside Game Studios, shipping installments for some of console gaming’s biggest series, including BioShock, Ratchet and Clank, and Borderlands. “It taught me the skill of testing a bunch of different things that I was not used to testing. It was learning. Learning new technology, learning new ways of doing things. And getting to express creative ideas in this big triple-A medium.”

In 2015, Alejandro pivoted to the emerging field of augmented reality, joining the team at Magic Leap Studios as the Head of Technology Operations. There, he launched software for the AR headset, including the sandbox experience Project Create “[The headset was] a crazy piece of technology that did something that almost nothing else could at the time. The games that we made on it were honestly beautiful,” says Alejandro.

Returning to his roots in traditional development, Alejandro reunited with former Darkside teammates – now at the newly formed Ghostpunch Games – where he joined the team as the Director of Technology. There, Alejandro led teams on co-development projects, including Pro Era NFL 1 & 2, Risk of Rain 2, and the massively successful battle royale Fortnite.

Today, Alejandro serves as the Senior Director and Head of Co-Development at Ghostpunch’s parent company Side (formerly PTW).

“Co-development is just game development as a service. It's really an umbrella because it involves every discipline or any one of the disciplines,” he explains. “[Studios] don't necessarily want thousands of employees to work for four years. So what they'll do is hire other companies to come in and solve specific problems for them, whether it's to help fill out a specific team or to take on a full feature.”

As a member of Full Sail’s Program Advisory Committee, Alejandro remains dedicated to supporting the next generation of game developers. “The community at Full Sail is unlike anything I’ve encountered… There’s an energy here that’s hard to find anywhere else. Coming back really helps recharge the batteries.”