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…