“I think that a game can be made about anything,” says Kayode Dada, a rising senior majoring in mechanical engineering. “But to make a good game,” he adds, “it takes a lot of time and effort and thinking about it.”
Dada has been thinking about games seriously since he was a teenager, but he took an interest in them much earlier. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, he and his brother would play card games, board games, and video games for hours. His face lights up as he recalls some of his favorites, including “Dungeons and Dragons,” “Catan,” “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” and “Risk.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, his family developed a nightly ritual. “For weeks and weeks, every single night we’d play a full game of ‘Monopoly.’ It was crazy!” he recalls.
Even as a kid, Dada wondered about the mechanics and decisions that went into the games he played, but it wasn’t until high school that he tried his hand at game design. He created his first game by constructing dice with different sides using arts and crafts materials. From there, the ideas kept coming. He figures during those years he designed about 25 games; he made nine of them and gave them to friends for their birthdays.
Much of his application to MIT revolved around board game design, too. At first, he didn’t believe MIT would accept him because he didn’t “do any real tech stuff,” Dada says. But reading the MIT Admissions blogs changed that — particularly a post by a computer science major who wrote that she had no coding experience before coming to MIT.
