Its hard to find gamers who aren’t at least familiar with the Atari 2600. Most have at least heard of the Intellivision or the Colecovision, however there was another console released in this generation that was an impressive machine but its timing could not have been worse.

Released in late 1982, the Vectrex stood out as a unique system among the others, but its unfortunate entry point into the console market it never had a chance.

What sets it apart?

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While most gaming consoles were designed to connect to a television set, the Vectrex system was built into a television set. Well, not exactly a TV, but it was a self-contained system with a 9”x11” monitor built in. This feature was a great selling point, allowing it to be set up anywhere and playing it didn’t take up the TV in the living room while dad was trying to watch Hill Street Blues.

The Vectrex’s primary distinguishing feature is that rather than displaying raster graphics like every other console known to man, it used vector graphics. Instead of drawing a whole screen of chunky full-color graphics, vector monitors only display lines and points in a single color. Classic arcade games like Asteroids, Battlezone, Tempest and Star Wars used vector graphics instead of raster, which gave those games a unique and distinctive look. While colorful sprite-based graphics weren’t possible, vector image are bright and razor sharp to the point of almost having a neon look to them. In addition, they were animated much more smoothly than raster graphics.

Since the console could not display color graphics, each game shipped with a gel color overlay to give the illusion of color. These overlays are hard to find and highly sought by retro game collectors.

Why did it fail?

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Timing. It was released just before the video game crash of 1983, so it was doomed no matter how innovative it was. By the time it hit the market, retailers were doing everything they could to purge video game merchandise from their shelves. If it were released just a year earlier, it would have been far more well-known and respected. Nobody knows exactly how many machines were sold, but it’s theorized that it’s probably well under 500k and most likely in the 200k range. After all, it only existed at retail, in limited scope, for just over one year.

In conclusion

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There were only 29 commercially available Vectrex games released during its short life. The machine even featured a great built-in Asteroids clone named Minestorm. However, there is a passionate fanbase who is infatuated with the Vectrex and dozens of homebrew games have been developed and released for the console.

What could have been a classic system was doomed from the start by factors out of its control. If you ever see a Vectrex console, definitely give it a look. I came across one a few years ago and today I’m kicking myself for not buying it then and there. I’ll likely never see another one out in the wild.

Have you ever seen or played a Vectrex console? What did you think?

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

^{Cover Image Source: By Marcin Wichary - Flickr: Vectrexes, CC BY 2.0}