Vectrex Reborn: How a chance encounter gave new life to a dead console

The Vectrex may be the most innovative video game console you've never heard of. It had everything it needed to revolutionize, including consoles far more advanced than competitors and the ability to render polygons a decade before the 3D gaming revolution.

It was years ahead of anything else on the market, yet it couldn't have been launched at a worse time. Vectrex hit stores at the end of 1982. Over the next six months, the then-booming video game market went bankrupt. The Vectrex, a potential revolution in home gaming, was swept into bargain bins, forgotten by all but avid collectors.

Forty years later, there is something of a comeback. New developers are breathing new code into this ancient machine, hardware hackers and tinkerers are working to ensure tired capacitors and CRT tubes remain functional, and a new game has seen a retail release after sitting unplayed for four decades.

Finally, this could be Vectrex's time to shine.

History of Vitrix

1982 was a great year for video games. Titles like Saxon, first place, S*bertAnd drill drill It was new in the arcades. In the home gaming scene, a seemingly unquenchable consumer desire has fueled a period of innovation unparalleled today. A $200 billion industry He has testified ever since.

To give some context, Sony sold 11.8 million PlayStation 5 units in 2021, the first full year of availability for the console. In 1982, 12 million Atari 2600 home consoles flew off store shelves, even though the nascent home gaming industry was worth $4 billion.

This boom led to the creation of Vectrex. The system was born at Los Angeles-based hardware design firm Smith Engineering. Conceived as a portable system with a small 1-inch cathode ray tube display, the Vectrex concept eventually grew into the production version of the 9-inch display you see here.

The system was initially scheduled to be released by Kenner Toys, but when that deal fell through, General Consumer Electronics (GCE) stepped in and brought it to market in late 1982 after a successful debut at the Consumer Electronics Show that summer. The initial hype for Vectrex was so successful that Milton Bradley acquired GCE in 1983.

The Vectrex's design was unique, as the video game console was fully integrated into the vertically oriented CRT. This was at a time when most families only had one television. Playing Atari at the time meant fighting with your siblings and parents over who controlled the TV because an episode of the series was missing Team A It had real consequences. Not only was DVR technology still decades away, but Sony was still trying to argue that recording TV was in the works VCR tapes were illegal.

But the real reason behind the Vectrex all-in-one display is that it relies on display technology that has never been seen in a home system before (nor since). Vector graphics are truly rare in the gaming arena. 1979 Asteroids Perhaps the most famous example, while in 1983 star Wars It is far and away the most impressive.

With a few exceptions, every video game you've ever played consists of a series of pixels. Whether it's CRT, LCD, LED, or even OLED, you're still talking about images made up of tiny dots of light. As the years go by, those pixels get smaller and smaller. Likewise, the graphical power provided by advanced GPU systems like the GeForce RTX 4090 allows those pixels to coalesce into more realistic 3D worlds than ever before.

In the end, it's all a bunch of pixels. In Vectrex, there are no pixels. As the name suggests, the graphics here are all made up of vectors. This means straight rays of light are drawn from A to B, and electrons shoot straight and narrow onto the cathode ray tube which glows in response. Connect three such lines, and you have a triangle, a simple polygon, which is the building block of all mainstream 3D games to this day.

This lack of pixels means that even after 40 years, watching Vectrex in action is strangely captivating. There's a fluidity to the primitive graphics, an innate unity that was not only missing in other games of the period, but still looks fresh today.

However, overall fidelity is admittedly low. Although color TVs were well and truly mainstream by 1983, the Vectrex is decidedly black and white, a problem that was “solved” by some clever engineers on a tight budget. Most Vectrex titles come with a translucent coating, which is a full-color sheet of plastic that is held in place over the screen, injecting some colors into an unfortunately desaturated CRT.

Powering this machine was a relatively simple array of silicon with an 8-bit Motorola 6809 microprocessor at its heart, the same processor behind arcade classics like Robotron: 2084 and many later Williams pinball machines. It ran at 1MHz with 1KB of RAM at its disposal.

The chip was paired with an integrated control panel with an analog joystick, far more advanced than the four-way joysticks found on every other home console at the time.

All those specialized devices resulted in a special price. Vectrex launched in 1982 at $199 — about $650 in 2023. Less than 18 months later, it died.

Mosque

Sean Kelly is among the world's leading video game collectors. “I've been collecting video games for a long time,” he told me. “I've probably had more than 100,000 video games through my hands over the years.” He said that at one point he had more than 50,000 cars in his garage.

If this sounds like an industrial process rather than just an obsession, you're not wrong. Kelly is one of the founders of the National Video Game Museum in Frisco, Texas, which was established in 2016 and is home to several video game collectors, such as the original Nintendo World Championship cartridge.

It may have been the attraction to another failed console of the early 1980s – the Intellivision – that initially fostered Kelly's love of video games, but it had a large role in keeping the Vectrex alive. He began by releasing so-called multi-carts, Vectrex cartridges that contained multiple separate games that could be accessed first by toggling DIP switches and later via the software menu.

Since many Vectrex titles saw limited releases or were not released at all, multiple carts like this were the only way for those few die-hard fans of the system to get a chance to play them.

It was one of those games Mail planewhere you can select ideal delivery routes, then load packages and move across the country.

Thanks to the sudden cancellation of Vectrex, Mail plane It never saw the release. You'd be forgiven for thinking so. On Shawn's website, VectrexMultiyou'll find canned versions of Mail plane Ready to order.

The toy comes in the silver packaging that was standard for Vectrex releases of its day, and it also comes with a stylus pen, a peripheral used to input these delivery methods.

Kelly has supplied manufacturers for every aspect of retail packaging. Various initial versions of the game's code were floating around, but Kelly says most of them were incomplete. “In addition to collecting video games, I also had a passion for hunting down people who used to produce games,” he said. This research was begun to find the most complete version of Mail plane.

“We would find that this ex-employee or that ex-employee had a few cartridges, and we would go through the cartridges and look at them,” and eventually he would get the cartridges closest to the final one, Kelly said. “No one knows for sure if it is 100 percent complete, but overall, we believe this is the most complete version.”

He gave other games the same treatment, including Tour of France, where you pedal frantically down a polygonal road to Paris, grabbing water bottles along the way and carefully controlling your rider's stamina. It's a strange title, with Kelly lamenting that it wasn't a sales success. “Tour of France He said: “He is one of the people I will be buried with.” “I lost money Tour of France“.

Kelly declined to say which games have made money, but it's clear in talking to him that it's all about passion, not profits.

Along the way, the release of these games provided Kelly and his companions with some valuable experience before the surprise surprise: the discovery of a game that no one had ever heard of, not even those who worked at the Global Campaign for Education or Milton Bradley.