I was lucky enough to be a kid well, not too old during the Age of Arcades, that magic time from 1980-1985 where arcades were just where you spent a lot of time. There were a couple of hotels in Concord (NH) where we could go, and then at University of New Hampshire, they had a bunch in the basement of the student union, but I lived in Dover, and we had Funspot. Just one of those remains (in Laconia, NH), but back then, you could find them lots of places, and lots of competitors besides. Everyplace had at least a couple machines. The Fox Run Mall in Newington had an excellent arcade, and Chuck E. Cheese was a good place to play the classics.
The promise of the home consoles at the time (The Atari VCS, the Intellivision, the Colecovision, etc) was that you could bring that arcade experience home. Not true. The Colecovision came the closest, and I did have one, but nothing came close to matching the arcade.
Except, one did. The Vectrex.
Back in the day, there were two different kinds of tech in arcade games. Raster graphics, which build images a row at a time from pixels, and those with vector graphics, that draw everything with lines. These are games like Asteroids, Tempest, the original Star Wars and so on.
These displays were big at UNH – the computer lab had some Tektronix vector displays that the grad students (not me, never me) could play with. And of course, we had Asteroids and Battlezone downstairs in the student union to show the potential. I might have loved those vector games because of that Tektronix forbidden fruit… Anyway…
I saved up for an Atari VCS while I was in college and occasionally I could afford to get a new game for it. I loved getting arcade games for it – Defender was my fave. But I just never could believe those terrible 2600 graphics. The game devs who took arcade games and managed to make them work at all on the 2600 have my respect, but I wanted the real thing.
When the Vectrex came out, that was what I wanted. I couldn’t afford it, and I sour grapes’d it by rationalizing that I’d spent so much on Atari VCS games that it wouldn’t make any sense to buy another system. Besides, I’d just blown all sorts of money on an Atari 800 (totally serious work machine there).
Didn’t change the fact that I wanted one. Anyway, Toys R Us stopped carrying them, and it was just another bit of video gaming history. Every so often someone on YouTube would rediscover the Vectrex and make me feel bad about not buying one back in the day.
To be honest, if I had, it’d probably have gotten lost or destroyed sometime in the last four decades, just like the Atari VCS, Colecovision and my beloved Atari 800 disappeared.
I’d been thinking about getting a Vectrex for awhile. I’m at the stage of my life where I think I could take care of a Vectrex, give it the love and care it needs, keep it healthy, play with it regularly, etc. Last summer, I saw one in a “CONSOLES FROM THE DAAAARKKK AAAAGESSSSSS” display at the Retro Game Con. It looked lonely. I wanted to take it home. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye out for one to show up at the local retro game shops.
No luck – but I did see a shelf full of Vectrex games at one of those shops. Well, if I only had a Vectrex. We went back a month later and they still had those games – so I bought a couple. And when I got home, I found a Vectrex in good condition on fleaBay and I bought it and it arrived today. The box it came in had been through a war, but the Vectrex inside was well protected and booted up fine.
The Vectrex display is monochrome. Arcade vector displays went to color pretty quickly, but Vectrex was discontinued before it could get a color version. In order to punch things up a bit, Vectrex games came with a plastic overlay that you can clip onto the display to give it some color. You can see those overlays with Mine Storm, Star Trek and Berzerk in the picture above. I don’t have one for Solar Quest, the fourth game I have for the system.
I will soon get a cartridge that has over one hundred games for the system, as game devs have never stopped developing games for the machine. That cartridge has every published game for the system, many unpublished games, and a ton of games written more recently. The system is probably more popular now than it ever was in 1982. So… expect to be hearing more about my new baby in the coming months.