tim stevens
Vectrex may be the most innovative video game console you’ve ever heard of. The product had everything it needed to spark a revolution, including a much more sophisticated controller than its competitors and the ability to render polygons a decade before his 3D revolution in gaming. .
It was years ahead of other products on the market, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Vectrex hit the shelves in late 1982. Over the next six months, the then-booming video game market collapsed. His Vectrex, which had the potential to revolutionize home gaming, was thrown away in the bargain bin and forgotten by all but the most dedicated collectors.
Forty years later, it’s undergoing a resurgence of sorts. A new developer breathed new code into this aging machine, a hardware hacker and tinkerer made sure his tired capacitors and his CRT continued to work, and new games were added to his 40-year-old unplayed machine. It was released retail after being abandoned.
Finally, Vectrex’s time may have come to shine.
History of Vectrex
1982 was a banner year for video games.title like Saxon, pole position, Kubertand Dig Dug It was new in the arcade. In the home gaming scene, unbridled consumer desire has sparked a different era of innovation. 200 billion dollar industry I’ve been watching it ever since.
For some background, Sony sold 11.8 million PlayStation 5 units in 2021, the first time the console was released in a full year. Back in 1982, 12 million of his Atari 2600 consoles disappeared from store shelves, even though the nascent home gaming industry was less than his $4 billion.
This boom prompted the birth of Vectrex. The system was born at Los Angeles-based hardware design firm Smith Engineering. The Vectrex concept was conceived as a portable system with a small 1-inch cathode ray tube screen, and eventually grew into the 9-inch screen production version seen here.
Kenner Toys was originally scheduled to launch the system, but when that deal fell through, General Consumer Electronics (GCE) stepped in, and after a successful debut at the Consumer Electronics Show that summer, it was sold in 1982. The system was launched on the market at the end of the year. Vectrex’s initial reputation was so successful that Milton Bradley acquired his GCE in 1983.
The Vectrex design was unique: it was a fully integrated video game console in a vertically oriented CRT. This was a time when most households only had one television. Back then, playing Atari meant fighting with your siblings and parents over who had control of the television. team It produced realistic results. Not only was DVR technology still decades away, but Sony was trying to say you could still record TV shows. VCR cassettes were illegal.
But the real reason Vectrex integrated a display was because it relied on display technology not seen in home systems before (and since). Vector graphics are truly rare in the gaming scene. 1979’s asteroid Perhaps the most famous example is the 1983 Star Wars What impresses me the most?
With a few exceptions, every video game you’ve ever played is made up of a series of pixels. Whether it’s CRT, LCD, LED, or even OLED, he’s still talking about images made up of tiny dots of light. As the years went by, these pixels became smaller and smaller. Similarly, the graphics power provided by advanced GPU systems like the GeForce RTX 4090 allows these pixels to be combined to build more realistic 3D worlds.
However, in the end it’s all just a bunch of pixels. Vectrex has no pixels. As the name suggests, the graphics here are all composed of vectors. This means a straight beam of light is drawn from A to B, and the electrons react and shoot straight down into a glowing cathode ray tube. Connecting three such lines creates a triangle, a simple polygon that is still the building block of all mainstream 3D games today.
The lack of pixels means that even 40 years later, watching Vectrex games in action is still oddly mesmerizing. The rudimentary graphics have a fluidity and innate crispness that not only was lacking in other games of the time, but still look novel today.
However, the overall fidelity is clearly lower. Although color television was fully mainstream by his 1983, Vectrex was decidedly black and white, a problem that was “solved” by some cunning and budget-minded engineering. Most Vectrex titles come with a transparent overlay. This is a full-color plastic sheet that clips into place over the display, injecting hue into the unfortunately unsaturated CRT.
Powering it was a relatively simple set of silicon with an 8-bit Motorola 6809 microprocessor at its heart. This processor is the same as the processor in arcade classics such as: Robotron: 2084 and many subsequent Williams pinball machines. It ran at a powerful 1 MHz with 1 KB of RAM at its disposal.
This chip was combined with an integrated control pad with an analog joystick, which was much more advanced than the four-way joysticks found on all other home console controllers at the time.
All the special hardware led to special prices. Vectrex was released in 1982 for $199, which translates to about $650 in 2023 dollars. Within 18 months, it was dead.
collector
Sean Kelly is one of the world’s most prominent video game collectors. “I’ve been collecting video games for a long time,” he told me. “I’ve probably had over 100,000 of his video games over the years.” At one point, he said, he had more than 50,000 in his home garage.
If it sounds more like an industrial activity than just an obsession, you’re not wrong. Kelly is the co-founder of the National Video Game Museum in Frisco, Texas. This museum he founded in 2016 is home to many unicorns of video game collecting, including the original Nintendo World Championship cartridge.
Perhaps it was his affinity for Intellivision, another failed console in the early ’80s, that first fostered Kelly’s love of video games, but he was instrumental in Vectrex’s survival. contributed greatly. He began by releasing so-called multi-cart, Vectrex cartridges containing multiple individual games, first accessed by toggling his DIP switch, and then through the software’s menus.
Given that many Vectrex titles were released in limited release or not at all, multi-carts like this were the only way the system’s few die-hard fans had a chance to play them.
One of those games is mail planeNow it’s time to plan the best shipping route, load your belongings and move them across the country.
Thanks to the sudden cancellation of Vectrex, mail plane I haven’t seen the release. But it’s no wonder I thought so. On Sean’s website, vectorex multiYou can find the boxed version of. mail plane You can order it.
The game comes in silver packaging, which was standard for Vectrex releases at the time, and also comes with a light pen, a peripheral used to input distribution routes.
Kelly sources all aspects of retail packaging from manufacturers. Various prototype versions of the game code were circulating, but Kelly said most of them were incomplete. “In addition to collecting video games, I also had a passion for hunting down the people who created them,” he said. This began the quest to find the most complete version. mail plane.
“We discovered that this former employee or that former employee had some cartridges, and we went through the cartridges and looked into them,” Kelly said, adding that they ultimately found something close to final. I have procured it. “No one knows if it’s 100% complete, but we generally think it’s the most complete version.”
He gave other games similar treatment. Tour de FranceSo pedal your way through the polygonal route to Paris, grabbing water bottles along the way and carefully managing your rider’s stamina. It’s a strange title, and Kelly laments that it hasn’t had much sales success. ”Tour de France “This is one of the things I will be buried with,” he said. Tour de France. ”
Kelly declined to say which games made him money, but when you talk to him, it’s clear this is all about passion, not profit.
In the process, releasing these games allowed Kelly and his colleagues to gain some valuable experience ahead of the surprise. It was the discovery of a game that seemingly no one had ever heard of, even those who worked at GCE and Milton Bradley.