Outer space dogfights is just one of the things which may herald the revival of the video game industry in Utah.

Then again, so may Tiger Woods, Don Corleone or the precocious teenagers from "High School Musical." All of them, along with assorted other characters ranging from heroic bugs to brawling monsters, have played starring roles in video games developed by Utah-based studios.

"Right now is a good time to be in video games, whether you're a developer or an artist," said Jay Barnson, the founder of Salt Lake-based Rampant Games, an independent game development and distribution company.

Barnson has been developing games since 1994 and has already seen the video game industry in the state hit its mid-1990s high and its eventual low during a general tech industry crumbling post-2000. However, in the past couple of years, the industry has started to pick up again, with real action happening during the past few months.

Since late last year, in fact, video game companies — as well as programing and artistic jobs — have started to swell noticeably along the Wasatch Front.

Headgate, which designed the Tiger Woods Golf series, was bought by Electronic Arts and is now programming games for the Nintendo Wii as EA Salt Lake. Avalanche Software, which was purchased by Disney in 2005 after a string of successful Playstation and XBox games, opened a second studio to focus on Nintendo platforms, Fall Line, under the Disney Interactive umbrella. And Incognito Entertainment, which played a major role in the development of the hugely popular "Twisted Metal" series, has created an off-shoot studio called Eat Sleep Play to complement their current contract work with Sony.

Then there is the surprisingly strong contingent of independent game developers, which range from programmers like Barnson, who work on games in their own time, or larger studios without corporate connections. That is also a segment Barnson sees growing very quickly, especially as more opportunities for casual puzzle or arcade-style games become available on platforms such as Windows and XBox.

"They can release games that just need to be downloaded very easily," he said. "I predict that this will become very big for the independent developers in the coming years."

A big part of the reason for the industry's strength in Utah are the educational opportunities, especially at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. John Carter, associate director of the School of Computing at the U., said that both schools have become known for producing high-quality programmers, especially for graphic design and animation.

"When I talk to different studio heads, one of their main goals is to find talent," Carter said, noting that it helps immensely to have multiple universities in a geographic area, something Utah offers that other areas, especially in the Midwest, lack. "One of the reasons the Silicon Valley exists is because of what is happening at UC-Berkeley and Stanford."