Advent of Computing - Episode 27 - Vectrex, Playing With Vectors

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

The 1980s were a turbulent and fast-moving decade for the video game industry. There were huge success stories, rapid advancements in technology, and the North American Video Game Crash. Caught up in all of this was an ambitious machine called the Vectrex. In an era dominated by pixelated graphics the Vectrex brought higher resolution vector images and early 3D to market. But ultimately it would be swept away during the market's crash. Today we are taking a dive into the development of the Vectrex, what made it different, and how it survives into the modern day. Like the show? Then why not head over and support me on Patreon. Perks include early access to future episodes, and stickers: https://www.patreon.com/adventofcomputing

One of my favorite things about the history of technology is all the near-misses. All the inventions that could have changed the course of development if they had just become a little more popular, or if they had come at a more opportune moment. And speculating on the possible futures that could have come out of just a small tweak can lead us down some really interesting paths. What if the internet had spread out of Russia and not the United States? interesting paths? What if the internet had spread out of Russia and not the United States? What if Xerox was able to bring a graphical workstation to market long before Apple? Or, what if video games had taken an entirely different evolutionary path? Today, I want to examine that last question. So, what comes to mind when you think of old video games? For me, I go right to

memories of playing simple computer games in the amber glow of my dad's video games. For me, I go right to memories of playing simple computer games in the amber glow of my dad's old PC. For a lot of people, their first exposure to video games may have been with the Atari 2600, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, maybe an arcade. Different people's memories will vary greatly on this, but I'm willing to bet they all have one thing in common. When you think of old video games, you think of pixels. Whether monochrome or in vibrant colors, high or low resolution, on a TV screen, or even on a computer monitor. Even modern games, despite being much more graphically advanced, are still composed entirely of millions of tiny pixels. It's really

become a given that any type of graphics will be, at least at some point, turned into a field of simple pixels. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. In the early 1980s, there was an alternative path just opening up for video game graphics. A machine that didn't use pixels in the traditional sense of the word, that could render crisp graphics and could even handle 3D. That console was called the Vectrex. Ultimately, it would fade into semi-obscurity, but examining it offers an interesting view into a future that may well have been.

Welcome back to Advent of Computing. I'm your host, Sean Haas, and this is episode 27, Vectrex, playing with vectors. Today, we're going to be looking at a very strange video game console from the early 1980s. Now, if you haven't heard of the Vectrex, then you're not alone. It was a relatively short-lived console, first selling in 1982 and then being discontinued just two years later. But if you've seen one, then you probably remember it. The big feature of the Vectrex was its vector display. Instead of rendering games as pixelated graphics as was common at the time, it drew higher resolution images built out of sharp lines. Games just plain looked and felt different

on the Vectrex, different than anything else on the market. The console was even capable of 3D graphics all the way back in 1982. I've heard it often called ambitious, maybe overly so, and that could be correct. The short lifespan should speak for itself. The Vectrex came and went never really catching on. Were its poor sales due to the technology just being ahead of its time? Or was there something more mundane at play? But the Vectra screen wasn't the only unique property of the Vectrex. The rest of its hardware is just as strange. So today, we're going to look at this bizarre machine.

But that's just part of the story. To understand what made the Vectrex so unique, we need some context, so we're going to be taking a little bit of a winding path through its history. Were the features that made the Vectrex stand out a recipe for its undoing? And what sort of legacy did the machine leave behind? 1980 was a big year for the video game industry. It was right in the middle of what some have called the golden age of the arcade. Pac-Man, Missile Command, and Centipede were all released that year, with other big names like Frogger and Donkey Kong very soon to follow.

Demand from these games and their contemporaries turned arcades from niche locales to a cultural phenomenon. In the home market, the Atari 2600 was just starting to hit its stride, and the Intellivision was just hitting shelves. The same year, the Sinclair ZX80 and the TRS-80 Color Computer were also released. There were more ways than ever to get into video games. And a lot of that was thanks to major leaps forward in computing technology. And as this vibrant scene was unfolding, Mike Purvis and John Ross were just realizing that they may have bought too many CRT screens.

realizing that they may have bought too many CRT screens. The two were engineers at an outfit called Western Technologies slash Smith Engineering, or just WTSC so we don't have to keep saying the long name. So why did they think hoarding these tiny screens was a good idea? Well, you see, WTSC was an early video game company. As near as I can tell, the firm was in operation since at least 1979, with their first big product being a handheld gaming system called the Microvision. So let's go into some history of why it might seem like a good idea to stock up on these tiny displays. From the early roots, we can see that some major themes start to develop within WTSC. The Microvision was one of the first handheld gaming systems produced.

In that sense, WTSC and its founder, Jay Smith, were already blazing new trails. And as with a lot of new inventions, there's bound to be some strangeness going on. By the 1970s standards, the Microvision was pretty small. It was about the size of a bulky TV remote. The console itself was relatively simple, consisting of a small control paddle at the bottom of the device, a small LCD screen about an inch wide in the middle, and a port for cartridges on the top. Well, cartridges may be the wrong term, but I can't really think of a more accurate one. The Microvision actually had no internal CPU, ROM, or RAM. Instead, each game cartridge contained its own control logic, including a processor and memory, all packed into a microcontroller.

A cartridge was about the same length and width as the console itself, providing a screen overlay and sometimes extra control buttons. In 1979, WTSE struck a deal with Mattel to manufacture and sell units, and it had some modest success. For the time, there was nothing like it, and nothing similar has been made in the decades since its launch. When Purvis and Ross were looking down at a stack of tiny CRT tubes, the Microvision was still on shelves. There were major problems with the liquid crystal display used by the Microvision. Since LCDs are a lot closer to digital devices, you can only get a set resolution out of them. For Microvision, that meant a 16x16 grid of pixels. Not much to work with.

By contrast, CRTs are analog, so they're a little more flexible in what they can display. The chance to test out some ideas for improved games with fancier screens would have been too good to pass up. So they started fiddling with these new displays, trying to determine if they could get some interesting graphics on them, or maybe even build a game into one. The difference between Microvision's small LCD display

and these newly acquired CRT screens couldn't have been bigger. I already mentioned the digital vs. analog component, but I think it bears going into a little more detail. Conceptually, controlling an LCD is very simple. Each pixel of the display is addressable, so you can just tell the display to light up a specific pattern of pixels. It's easy to control, but on the flip side, you have to keep track of every pixel you want to display. For a 16x16 screen like the ones used by the Microvision, that meant you needed a way to manage 256 pixels worth of data. The larger

the LCD, the more memory you'll need for storing and manipulating the display's data. A CRT, however, works on a totally different principle. Cathode ray tubes don't really have pixels per se. The core of their operation comes down to an electron gun. It's essentially a device that can shoot out a beam of electrons at a relatively high speed. That gun sits at the back of the screen's tube and blasts electrons towards the front, the part that actually faces you. The entire front face of the tube is lined with a layer of phosphorus that glows once enough energy is transferred to it by the stream of electrons. Around the electron gun is a device called a deflection yoke, which is really just an electron magnet. By controlling the amount of current going into the yoke, the electron beam can

be steered around the screen. Doing this makes it possible to draw an image on one of these CRTs. From this basic design, you can create essentially any image you want on a display. Devices like televisions or some game consoles usually work by breaking down an image into a stream of continuous data, and that's drawn onto a CRT in the form of scan lines. So while a CRT may be a little more tricky to work with, it offers a large amount of flexibility. Definitely more so than the LCD displays that Purvis and Ross would have been used to using. But that's the thing. Most video game consoles of the time didn't take full advantage of the

improved functionality of a CRT over other displays. Take for instance the Atari 2600. Internally, the console drew all its graphics to a 160x192 pixel buffer. Then, using some specialized hardware, it turned that grid of pixels into a signal that a standard television could draw. It was an effective technique, one used by almost every other game console on the market. But it wasn't using a CRT to its full potential. One of the reasons for the popularity of this method came down to the ease of use. Systems like the Atari 2600 were built to plug into a standard home TV set. That could only accept display signals similar to what a TV station would broadcast.

There simply wasn't a good way to have fine control over a standard set like that. Having a custom display for a console would have been a major mark against the system, so video game manufacturers had to work within these somewhat constrained bounds. The crew at WTSC was in a good position to look at things from a different angle. They didn't have to be stymied with the standard restraints, they hadn't made one of these normal consoles, and they had experience with controlling displays directly. And with a flat of bare CRT tubes, they had a really good opportunity for some experimenting. Early on in this process, Purvis and Ross settled on using vector graphics instead of

the more traditional pixel-based games. These were crisp lines drawn on the CRT by controlling the electron gun directly. And this is where we see the seeds of the Vectrex start to grow. So why would someone bother drawing vectors besides the challenge of making something different? As it turns out, vectors are actually a little bit easier to draw on a screen than pixels. That is, at least if you have full control over the cathode ray tube. To draw a vector, all you need to do is steer the electron beam to the start of the line, turn on the electron gun, steer the beam to the end of your line, and then just turn the gun off.

Since controlling the beam is done using analog inputs, you can fine tune the output a whole lot. You aren't confined to a grid. You also save a lot of memory in the process. You don't need to store every pixel that makes up a line, just the start and stop positions. It's a whole different approach. The other major reason to go this route comes back to competition. Believe it or not, vector graphics weren't a new thing in 1980.

In fact, we've even talked about vector games on this podcast before. 1980. In fact, we've even talked about vector games on this podcast before. Early mainframe video games like Space War were rendered using vectors as far back as the early 1960s. But more importantly, there were quite a few arcade games that used vector graphics. I said earlier that the era the Vectrex was developed in was the golden age of the arcade, and I can't underline that enough. It was a huge influence on the growing video game market. For the time, arcade games had the best graphics possible. It was the gold standard for the best video games of the time. But the machines used for these games were expensive and complicated beasts. not something that a household could easily afford

or maintain. Home consoles were always being judged against their more upscale arcade counterparts, so manufacturers were always trying to get closer and closer to the idea of an arcade game at home. But not all arcade games used pixelated graphics. As it turns out, some popular games rendered using vectors. Asteroids, released in 1979 by Atari, was one such game. It should be familiar to most people. In Asteroids, you pilot a small spaceship and blast away approaching asteroids and the occasional flying saucer. But perhaps its most striking feature is its graphics. It was in black and white, but compared to everything else in arcades, it was surprisingly crisp, and it just looked futuristic. By making use of vectors, Asteroids was able to set itself apart from the competition, and in the coming years, a good number of arcade machines would pop up using the same crisp black and white vector displays.

WTSC was going down the path of bringing the arcade experience home, and they could make it a reality, at least part of it. After some tinkering, Purvis and Ross had something working like a demo. Initially, they called this machine the Mini Arcade. It was designed to be a handheld gaming system, using a tiny 1-inch tube display. They took this demo to Jay Smith, their boss at the time, who really liked the idea. So, like with the Microvision, it was decided to start looking for an outside firm to manufacture and sell the new console. But the road for the mini arcade to a mass market product would be a pretty twisty one. Before 1980 drew to a close, Jay Smith and his crew of engineers were out shopping around their idea for a handheld vector-based console. The first promising bid came from Kinner, which,

at the time, was a pretty large toy manufacturer. WTSC had recently developed a few Atari 2600 games for Kenner, so it was an easy swing to show them this new console that was in development. The toy company liked what they saw, generally speaking. At this point, the mini arcade was being billed as a handheld, but Kenner wanted to scale that up to a larger tabletop system. So, after another round of internal development, this led to a larger console, upping the 1-inch tube to a 5-inch screen. No prototypes of this iteration have ever surfaced, but supposedly it was completed. But, for whatever reason, Kenner pulled out of the deal before this new console could come to market, and this would leave WTSC without a manufacturer.

Judging by the lack of a 5-inch CRT console in the wild, the two companies must have broken things off pretty early into development. However, there was a silver lining to all this. While courting Kenner, the crew at Smith Engineering had built an improved prototype of the mini-arcade. According to Kinner, the crew at Smith Engineering had built an improved prototype of the mini-arcade. So, it was back to shopping for a partner with this new 5-inch tabletop version of the console. And it wouldn't take long to find another promising lead. By fall of 1981, Smith was in contact with General Consumer Electronics. And luckily for everyone involved, GCE would pan out a lot better than Kinner had.

GCE already had some experience with video games, at least kind of tangentially. In the same year that J. Smith got in touch, GCE had released an interesting device called the, in all caps, Chase Encounter. Now, this is a strange combination of a pocket calculator, a clock, and a handheld game, or as GCE put it on the packing, the pocket calculator that plays three challenging adventure games. They also produced a nearly identical handheld called Space Encounter, once again, all caps, that touted three space-themed games. These are far from classics or smash hits, but it underlines the point that GCE did have some experience in the game market and an interest. Adding a bigger and better console to their portfolio would make sense.

But just like Kenner, they wanted the Mini Arcade to be markedly less mini. So it was upped from a 5 inch to the final 9 inch cathode ray display. The name also had to change. Mini Arcade was too generic and there was already a copyright on that name floating around. So after some workshopping, the final name was decided upon. Vectrex. From there, it was just a matter of turning the rough prototypes into a working console. So what did this final machine look like? It should be clear already that we're dealing with a machine unlike anything else, and that's true both inside and out. The most noticeable part of this console is its screen. The 9-inch CRT tube is mounted in a portrait orientation,

with the Vectrex's case built around it. Partly, this was done to make it stand out. It doesn't just look like a bulky TV, it looks like a totally different kind of device. Under the screen was a small cubby for holding the console's two controllers, behind which a power and volume knob was hidden. On the left of the console was a cartridge port with a power cable coming out of the back. It was a well thought out design, it stood out, and it was functional. But once we get inside the machine, things get even stranger. John Hall, one of the programmers tasked with developing launch games for the Vectrex, has

a great description of the early development of the console. Prior to their partnership with GCE, part of Smith's firm had been assigned to Project Breaker, an internal attempt to reverse engineer the Atari 2600. Now, if WTSC was able to bring a console that was a clone of the most popular machine at the time to market, well, that could have been a major seller for them. Ultimately, Project Breaker failed, the research just didn't get too far off the ground. Instead of producing a new product, however, Project Breaker gave the company something that may have been more important, experience. Just coming off Breaker, Hall and his colleagues had become pretty comfortable with the Atari hardware,

and especially the Motorola 6502 processor that powered the console. So as Vectrex was first getting off the ground, it was decided to use the same processor as the 2600, and it was also decided to pull in Hall and his crew to program it. So far, that's a pretty normal story. You want to play to your team's strengths. But any good story needs a little extra twist to it. The 6502 was a massively popular processor in the 70s through to the mid-80s. In addition to powering the Atari 2600, it also showed up in the Apple II, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64, and eventually the Nintendo Entertainment System.

For a time, this Motorola chip was everywhere you looked. But that doesn't mean it was perfect. The 8-bit processor had its faults. Being an 8-bit system was one issue in itself. The 6502 was also a relatively slow chip with limited capabilities. It didn't have built-in support for multiplication or division. There were major limits on simple tasks, even like calling functions. And to get a little technical, it also had no support for position-independent code.

This is a bit of a complex issue, but it comes down to the fact that a program compiled for the 6502 had to live in a very specific chunk of memory, and it can't go anywhere else. Beyond that, the processor was also pretty inflexible with how memory was used in general. These factors made programming the 6502 a recipe for frustration, and Hall's team was acutely aware of that. Hall recalled years later, quote, as the design of the Vectrex progressed, it was quickly decided that the 6502 would not be fast enough. One aspect of speed was the clock rate. I believe a 1 MHz clock was used for the 6502, 1.5 MHz for the 6809. More importantly than clock rate was the architecture and instruction set of the 6809. The 6502 had a relatively primitive instruction set, where doing fundamental things like indexing could be quite awkward. End quote. The newer chip,

the 6809, was one possible solution. And it would be what the Vectrex would stick with throughout its production run. It was roughly the same family as the 6502, so the programming team was able to adapt to it pretty well. That being said, this was a pretty strange chip. First off, the clock rate was faster, but there were other big improvements. The 6809 had hardware support for multiplication, which, right out of the gate, made things a lot easier to deal with. Code was also now relocatable, which added more flexibility to programmers. Overall, it was a vast improvement, easier to program, and just more fully featured. But here's the weirdness. program and just more fully featured. But here's the weirdness. The 6809 had a mix of 8-bit and 16-bit features. It's a kind of half-and-half approach, and it's not very common. For instance,

the 6502 was a fully 8-bit processor. All its internals, its math, and operations were done using 8-bit-wide numbers. It read 8-bit numbers from memory, were done using 8-bit wide numbers. It read 8-bit numbers from memory, and it wrote 8-bit numbers back. Internally, the 6809 had a mix of 8 and 16-bit registers, and it could perform both 8 and 16-bit calculations. But data still came in and went out of the chip as 8-bit numbers. It's sort of the strange middle ground between the older 8-bit chips and the newer 16-bit chips that were just starting to come out at the beginning of the 1980s. The 6809 may have been an oddity, but its feature set, improved speed, and improved number crunching capabilities

made it a better fit for the Vectrex than the other Motorola chips of the era. And compared to contemporary game consoles, the Vectrex would need as many fast calculations as it could get. So what was all this number-crunching power used for? Well, games! The launch title for the Vectrex was, of course, a clone of Asteroids called Mindstorm. The game came built into the Vectrex, so without a cartridge plugged in, it would boot straight into a space shooting action game. It's a fairly basic 2D

shooter, but with its crisp graphics and simple familiar gameplay, it proved to be a good way to show off what the Vectrex was capable of. For all the world, it looked like consumers could now bring part of the arcade experience into their home. But there was a key feature that the Vectrex had that I've been keeping in my back pocket for a bit. The machine was capable of doing 3D graphics. It was relatively easy to draw out an object on the Vectrex with a bit of perspective, and thanks to the fact that every line was a vector, it was also pretty simple to scale down and rotate anything on screen. Those kinds of operations were really math intensive. So the 6809 was a perfect complement to the Vectrex's display. You got pretty fast scaling, rotation, and perspective effects.

Put all that together and you get some pretty convincing three-dimensional graphics. Not every game made use of this feature. There were quite a few 2D games like Mindstorm and a few other spaceship shooters, but the ones that did still remain impressive today. One of the more simple uses of the 3D effect is a game called Spike. It's essentially an isometric platform game, where you control a small star-shaped hedgehog character named Spike. You're tasked with jumping and climbing from one moving platform to another to reach the top of the screen. Each platform is rendered with perspective, so it looks like Spike is standing

on an actual surface. It's a subtle effect, but it makes for a pretty good looking game. If Spike is a simple version of 3D, then Web Escape is a much more fleshed out example. The entire playing field is a curved and constantly moving halfpipe. You play as a ship which can glide left and right in this arena as enemy drones and hazards fly towards you. As you play, the half-pipe twists and turns, of course changing perspective accordingly the whole time, and oncoming hazards scale as they get closer to your ship. It strikes me how smooth all the scaling and movement is. It's something that other consoles couldn't match for years to come, and everything is rendered as crisp 3D wireframes. It really

doesn't look like anything else out there, especially in the 1980s. Another impressive title that bears mentioning is Star Trek The Motion Picture The Game. It's a licensed tie-in to the sci-fi movie of the same name, but as far as the game goes, the theme isn't very noticeable. As with a lot of Vectrex games, it's a spaceship shooter, but what's impressive is it's a first-person perspective game. You feel like you're actually sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship while enemy ships fly after you. It's a pretty cool effect, and one that other consoles of the time simply couldn't produce. And I think that's the best way to describe the game library of the Vectrex. There's definitely some more simple examples, but most

make great use of the unique hardware in a way that no one else could do. But no matter how technically impressive things were, there is a major limitation to the hardware. Everything was in black and white. The graphics were impressive, but GCE was sure consumers wouldn't go for such a drab color palette. It simply wasn't possible to retrofit the Vectrex for a color display, at least not in time for launch. So to address this, each game came with an overlay. It's a color plastic sheet that could be placed over the console screen. It's a colored plastic sheet that could be placed over the console screen. It's a crude solution, but it did add a splash of color to games. Most overlays were designed to tint specific parts of the screen, such as turning the playing field red or coloring status bars.

Some also had text icons and other graphical elements that didn't need to be dynamic. The Vectrex, along with 12 games, would launch in November of 1982, and it was met with pretty universal excitement. One article in Byte Magazine wrote, quote, Here is one of the greatest game machines we have seen this year, with superb vector graphics,

excellent sound, cartridges for some of the best coin-operated arcade games, and a suggested retail price of $200, the Vectrex arcade system is a good bet to score big And really, what's not to love? The Vectrex was unique. It was capable of some great graphics. And it was just, overall, a slick machine. And the price was also pretty competitive.

At $200, or just over $500 adjusted for inflation, it was the same price as an Atari 2600. You could get the old, tired console, or you could warp into the future with Vectrex. And for a while, it was looking like Vectrex was going to really capture the market. The next year, 1983, Milton Bradley bought out GCE so they could get their hands on Vectrex. Thanks to now being owned by a larger firm, versions of Vectrex would start to ship internationally, hitting Europe and Japan by the end of the year. Between 82 and 84, the console's lifespan, just under 30 games would be released. There were even new peripherals for the machine being released all the way up to 1984. One was a light pin that was used for drawing in the vector screen

by a few games. The more impressive offering had to be, by far, the 3D imager. This with a set of goggles that, when worn, made the already impressive 3D effects of the Vectrex even more shocking. How the device worked is pretty interesting. Of course, the Vectrex used a monochrome screen, so a simple set of red and green tinted glasses wouldn't do any good. Instead, the 3D imager worked via a spinning disc just in front of the user's eyes that acted as a shutter. Half the disc was an opaque black plastic, while the other half was made of a colored transparent material. As the disc spun, it alternated between covering each eye.

By syncing its rotation up to the Vectrex, games were able to achieve stereoscopic 3D just by shifting the image in time with the spinning disc. The other huge feature of the 3D imager was that it added color to the Vectrex. Like I mentioned, the transparent half of the shutter wasn't totally clear. Rather, it had slices of different colored plastics. And often, a game would come with its own shutter with its own colored pattern. By timing changes to the display to the color filter currently in front of a user's eye, games were able to add rudimentary color. Overall, the 3D Imager is a really strange device,

but by all reports, it's very impressive. To me, it seems like just another one of the ambitious and unique aspects of the Vectrex that made it such a unique and such an impressive machine. aspects of the Vectrex that made it such a unique and such an impressive machine. So, why don't we have the Vectrex 5 on store shelves today? Why didn't Vectrex take off? The console was remarkable, it was unique, and it was well-loved by those who played it. So what happened to stop its rise to prominence? The answer to all those questions is a little something called the North American Video Game Crash. I've seen a range of dates for when this event started, but the most commonly repeated year is 1983. Starting around that time, the video game industry experienced a dramatic and incredibly destructive shift.

In the coming months and years, sales would drop dramatically, and companies would go under as the entire industry had to readjust. As with any event this large, there are a lot of factors at play, so I'm only going to go into a few of the most relevant ones as to our discussion today. And one of those, tangentially, traces back to WTSC itself. I talked a little bit about their project Breaker, the attempt to reverse engineer the Atari 2600. One of the big benefits of the project was institutional experience, there was another side. Breaker gave the team just enough information to write their own Atari games without any input or oversight from Atari. Ultimately, Atari games without any input or oversight from Atari. Ultimately, WTSC only made a few games under contract with Kenner. But other firms had their own versions of Project Breaker.

Big names like Activision started out making these kinds of third-party games for the Atari machine. But so did many other firms. That on its own was fine. More games and more developers just meant more options and more games, right? What's not to love? Well, not every third party was as good at game development as Activision. The result was inexperienced or just plain greedy companies churning out poorly made games and poorly made consoles. The market became flooded, and most of that flood was composed of garbage. Quality products like the Vectrex got caught up in all of this, but that's just one force at play. On the other side of the market was the personal computer. Starting in the early 80s, home computer manufacturers started to more aggressively pursue the gaming market.

Ads like this one, featuring the great William Shatner, would start hitting TVs during this time period. Why buy just a video game from Atari or Intellivision? Invest in the wonder computer of the 1980s for under $300. The Commodore VIC-20. Unlike games, it has a real computer keyboard. With the Commodore VIC-20, the whole family can learn computing at home. Plays great games too. Under $300, the wonder computer of the 1980s, the Commodore VIC-20. If you haven't seen, there's actually quite a few Commodore ads from the 80s that feature William Shatner, and I definitely recommend looking them up. They're an experience to say the least. Anyway, what Commodore was doing here was

a pretty smart move. Video games were still seen as toys, more a novelty than anything. A computer, well, that was on another level. Instead of forking over the $200 for an Atari or a Vectrex, you could pay just $100 more for an actual computer. You could get work done on the machine, it was educational, and it played great games too, just as well as any video game console. Commodore wasn't the only player taking this tactic. Texas Instruments, Radio Shack, Sinclair, the list goes on. Competition in the home computer market in the ensuing years would drive down prices and lead to more and more

capable machines. For all the world, it seemed that dedicated video game consoles were on the way out. With all these pressures, the video game industry crumpled. And for the Vectrex, that meant the end of the line. In 1984, the Vectrex was discontinued, and units started to be pulled from shelves. According to Milton Bradley, by this time GCE's parent company, the Vectrex lost them in the range of tens of millions of dollars. The hype was there. The product lived up to it, but timing would work against that. Just as the Vectrex was picking up steam, the market for it was reduced to near nothing. Folklore in the industry holds that unsold units were unceremoniously buried in a landfill just to get rid of them. But the Vectrex wouldn't fade into the night that easily.

them. But the Vectrex wouldn't fade into the night that easily. The fact of the matter was that people really liked the Vectrex, even if it didn't strike it big in the market. After 1984, there weren't any new games coming out for the console. But despite the lack of new content, the Vectrex kept a cult following. There was still a diehard fanbase. But there wouldn't be any new development for years. That is, until 1995. Or at least, this is the most commonly repeated new development. Supposedly, sometime in 95, Jay Smith made the entire Vectrex game library public domain. The story goes that back when GCE was going under, he bought back all the rights to Vectrex's software library. As compelling as this story is, I have my doubts about it. First off, I can't find any first-hand accounts from Jay Smith about buying back the rights to these games.

And upon digging a little further, it looks like the copyright for Vectrex, its logo, and a few of the game titles that I could easily search for are still held by GCE. So it could be that Smith did relinquish things over to public domain, but I'd take this with a grain of salt. Something more concrete also happened in 95, or should I say started. A programmer named John Donzilla would get deeply involved with Vectrex. To quote from an interview, Late in 1995, following the various Vectrex Usenet threads, one of the most popular subjects was always someone who was going to develop their own Vectrex RAM cart and code games for the Vectrex. I decided I wanted to be that someone, and the rest is history.

End quote. So, as early as 95, fans of the Vectrex were plotting about how to make new games, but not much had come of it. Donzilla would be the first to make meaningful progress. Over the course of the next few months, he would create the first new development tools for the Vectrex in years. The big one was a ROM cartridge emulator. This let him load software into the Vectrex from a computer and made a lot of future development possible. Then, in March of 1996, Donzilla announced Vector Vaders, the first new game written for the Vectrex in over a decade. This first homebrew game was relatively simple. It was a bare-bones Space Invaders clone. By all accounts, it ran a little slow, and according to Donzilla, it was programmed in just four spare days. But hey, I think we can cut

Vector Vaders a little slack. Donzilla had shown that it was possible to make new games for the Vectrex, a long-dead console that had no existing support. And from there, as he says, the rest was history. Donzilla himself would go on to release around two dozen new game cartridges for the Vectrex, ranging from compilations of existing software to totally new games. But he wouldn't be the only one to get involved with the Vectrex. new games. But he wouldn't be the only one to get involved with the Vectrex. As of today, there have been somewhere north of 100 homebrew games developed for the Vectrex. These range from digital releases to fully packaged game cartridges with custom screen overlays. As it turns out, a lot of the most impressive games on the Vectrex would come out of this new era of development. Now, there are too many titles

to go over them all, but I think the game iCyborg is a good example of what the community is producing. This game was released in 2004 by a group of enthusiasts called Fury. For some context, that's the same year the Nintendo DS would hit shelves. Anyway, iCyborg is a fully 3D third-person adventure game. As the name suggests, you play as a cyborg, and you traverse multiple levels to escape a dungeon. Levels range from tunnels to trenches to more open environments. Each level is full of traps to avoid, enemies to dispatch, and a boss fight at the end. For the Vectrex, it's visually impressive, making excellent use of the 3D scaling the system is capable of. iCyborg had a limited run of physical releases, of about 300 cartridges, and it's been re-released in small batches in 2011

and 2018. As of now, there is a sequel in the works, and that's just one of the multitude of titles being released for the Vectrex. The console has a thriving community, to say the least. And as of today, 36 years after the Vectrex was discontinued, there are a massive amount of resources for maintaining, repairing, and programming the console. Even John Hall, one of the original programmers on the Vectrex project way back at WTSC, has published a programming guide for the machine. So, in a lot of ways, the Vectrex lives on. It didn't make it as big as it could have. But, as time's gone on, more people have come to appreciate this small slice of what the future may have been.

Alright, I think it's time to bring this episode to a close. So that's the story of the rise, fall, and eventual rebirth of the Vectrex. Starting as a way to play around with some spare CRT screens, the console quickly went from idea to production to market. And just as quickly as it appeared, it faded away, at least for a time. What I like so much about this chapter in the history of technology is the big what-if that it gives us. What would video games look like today if the Vectrex had survived the crash of 83? Who's to say that it was even possible? On the one hand, companies like Nintendo did very well in the wake of the disaster by using careful marketing. The Nintendo Entertainment System came to America in 1985, just a few years after the gaming market in the States fell to pieces.

To get around the stigma, the NES was sold more as an appliance than a pure toy. That even factored into the design of the console. appliance than a pure toy. That even factored into the design of the console. The North American version came in a case a lot more reminiscent of a VCR than a game machine. Maybe the Vectrex could have waited out the storm and relaunched with new sales tactics. It was already different enough from other game systems that it may have been able to carve out a niche for itself in the wake of this reshaped market. And if, somehow, the Vectrex did survive, what would games look like today? Well, I don't think we can answer that question accurately,

but we can catch a glimpse of that future in the current homebrew scene. What new developers are doing on the Vectrex today is just as impressive, and in some cases more so, than the official releases in the 80s. So, while we might not be able to see Vector games in 2020 on the same scale that we could have, I think the homebrew scene could show us what games might have looked like at the end of the 1980s. If you want to get a feel for the Vectrex yourself, then I'd recommend checking out the Internet Archive's Vectrex collection. From there, you can play emulated vector games from the comfort of your web browser. While it may not have screen overlays, 3D goggles, or a light pen, it can still be hours of entertainment.

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