In a 1990 “The Far Side” cartoon, two hopeful parents watch their goofy child hunched over a video game console and dream of help-wanted ads of the future: “Can You Save the Princess? We need skilled men & women, $75,000 + Retirement” and “If You Have 50,000 Hours or More of Video Game Experience, We Need You!” At the time, the idea of a career in video games was laughable.
Not so for the folks who started the Game Studio program at Champlain College in Burlington, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Students learn everything from art to coding to publishing in what has become one of the most nationally respected programs in its field. Champlain’s website speaks directly to today’s hopeful parents, emphasizing careers and industry connections: Gaming is clearly super-serious business.
The Champlain College Art Gallery offers a respite amid this studious milieu and a chance to answer some important questions: Are these games fun? Who made them? Can you save the princess?
With “Another History: Alternative Stories in Game Development,” on view through October 27, gallery director and curator Wylie Garcia has created a ’90s-ish hangout space, complete with a Lisa Frank-inspired rainbow leopard-print wall, beanbag chairs, a pastel-splotched shag rug, and a cozy couch where students and visitors can play vintage games to their hearts’ content.
Vintage consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16 and PlayStation offer up everything from Wheel of Fortune to Grand Theft Auto on old-school CRT monitors. Around the room, emulators re-create just about any game you can think of (and many you won’t) from MiSTer, an open-source coding project that has compiled a vast library of all the games ever published for those and other console platforms.
There is even a working 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, sporting very rudimentary black-and-white Table Tennis (which inspired Atari’s arcade game Pong). Student Autumn Miranda worked with assistant professor Jonathan Ferguson to create a reimplementation of the Odyssey’s software that can be played without the original hardware.
Other students doing similar projects occasionally spread out the game schematics as they try to make sense of it. “It’s amazing to watch students working on that, here in the gallery,” Garcia said.
That kind of hands-on learning has been Garcia’s focus since she took over the gallery two years ago, when the pandemic was still top of mind. “My biggest mission,” she said, “was just bringing community back.”
As an artist, Garcia is known for her dreamy paintings that envelop the viewer in flowers. She came to Champlain with a background in studio-based fine arts and art history. Decades ago, she worked with an organization now called Curtains Without Borders, preserving painted historic theatrical backdrops from town halls all over Vermont. Today, her role as gallery director includes conserving entertainments of a newer era: managing and displaying Champlain’s game history collection and finding ways to engage students.
Garcia works closely with creative media students, teaching professional practice and helping them mount their capstone projects in the gallery. She connects visiting artists, faculty and students whenever possible. She has made it a priority to showcase emerging artists, she said, because “it’s important for students to see that opportunities exist.”
One of those projects is “Lakescape,” a new permanent mural and sound installation in the basement of Champlain’s Center for Communication and Creative Media. Garcia and John Thomas Levee, program director for Game Sound Design at Champlain, hatched the idea for an experiential artwork that would foster a sense of belonging within the local landscape. As a bonus, it would improve the drab, institutional hallway and mask sounds from the building’s mechanical room, near where most of the Game Sound students have their classrooms.
Garcia connected Levee with Burlington muralist Jake Barakat. Together, they have turned the hallway into a walk through Lake Champlain — a visitor might feel like a character moving through one of the gallery’s vintage games. Hundred-foot-long murals present New York’s lakefront on one side of the hallway and Vermont’s on the other; when completed on October 24, 10 speakers in the ceiling will play an immersive soundscape sampled from locations throughout the lake basin.
Some of the sites pictured are specific: Church Street Marketplace, Fort Ticonderoga. Others are more general but refer to particular sounds Levee has recorded, including a murmuration of birds and underwater audio. All of them benefit from Barakat’s graphic style, almost a folk-art version of Super Mario’s happy clouds and bright green-and-blue palette. The installation is a good example of one of Garcia’s goals at Champlain: creating a sense of inclusion and community connection for students navigating a field in which they are often perceived as loners.
Back upstairs at “Another History,” a timeline around the gallery offers information about developers often left out of the standard telling of gaming’s past. That includes people such as Dona Bailey, who designed the 1981 arcade hit Centipede, and David Gaider, who popularized diverse characters with Dragon Age, a popular fantasy role-playing series launched in 2009.
In September, students were invited to participate via streaming in the annual Game Devs of Color Expo; the exhibition also offers a selection of new, playable games from those developers. At the Game Studio program’s anniversary celebration on October 24, the gallery annex will display more than a dozen flat screens and a selection of posters showcasing games made by students over the past 20 years.
One example, senior Seven Coleman’s adorable game Pikki Rikki, is played on a Playdate handheld game system — the player turns a hand crank to pick vegetables for the bunny protagonist. More than anything, games such as these highlight the creativity and diversity changing the field from the sometimes clunky iterations of its early era (looking at you, Scooby-Doo Mystery).
Sophomore George Fink, who stopped by the gallery to meet a friend and play Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on the Sega Genesis, appreciates being able to access the original hardware and seeing what his peers have developed. “You leave the college and make your games,” he said, “and they’re still here.”
Correction, October 24, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect that John Thomas Levee is program director for Game Sound Design at Champlain.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Gaming the System | Champlain College celebrates 20 years of gaming with an exhibition and new permanent art installation”
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This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
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