Dead End: The Vectrex
Abstract
The Vectrex was the only home game console ever built around a vector display. Every other console of its era drew raster scan lines onto a household television; the Vectrex shipped with its own 9-inch monochrome tube and drew crisp glowing lines directly, the same way the Asteroids arcade cabinet did. It launched in North America in October 1982 for $199, was praised by reviewers, and was killed inside two years by the video game crash of 1983. Milton Bradley reported losing $31.6 million on it and discontinued it in February 1984. It remains the standing example of a home console whose defining feature was also the reason it could not survive a price war.
A Surplus-Bin CRT
The idea started with a piece of junk. In late 1980, engineers at Smith Engineering, a Southern California design house run by Jay Smith, were poking through Electro-Mavin, a surplus electronics warehouse in Los Angeles. John Ross and colleagues found a 1-inch cathode-ray tube and wondered whether a small electronic game could be built around it. The demo they built became a project codenamed Mini Arcade, a handheld.
Smith already knew the handheld business. In 1979 he had designed Milton Bradley’s Microvision, the first handheld game system to use interchangeable cartridges. But as Smith Engineering shopped the Mini Arcade to potential partners, the tiny tube gave way to a 9-inch one, and the handheld became a tabletop unit with the screen built in. The company licensed the design to General Consumer Electronics (GCE) in 1981 and unveiled the finished machine, now called the Vectrex, at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago on June 7, 1982.
Vectors in the Living Room
Consoles of the early 1980s worked by generating a raster image, a grid of dots painted line by line, and feeding it to a television. The Vectrex did something else. Its Motorola 6809 processor (running at 1.5 MHz, with 1 KB of RAM and 8 KB of ROM) steered the electron beam along the actual shapes on screen, drawing each line as a stroke rather than filling a grid. This is what Atari’s Asteroids and Lunar Lander cabinets did, and it produced clean, bright lines and smooth rotation that raster hardware of the period could not match.
The catch was that a vector display cannot use an ordinary TV, which expects a raster signal. So the Vectrex had to bring its own screen. That built-in 9-inch tube let it show arcade-style vector graphics at home, and it also fixed the console’s price at the cost of a small monitor rather than zero.
The tube was monochrome. Color came from a low-tech trick: each cartridge shipped with a translucent plastic overlay that clipped over the screen, tinting different regions and cutting glare. The pack-in game, Mine Storm, was an Asteroids-style shooter built into the console’s ROM.
The 3D Imager and the Light Pen
Smith Engineering pushed the format further than the market asked. The 3D Imager, designed by John Ross, was a headset with a motor-driven disc of colored filters that spun in sync with the screen, producing a color 3D effect from the monochrome tube. It was among the first 3D peripherals sold for any home console. A light pen let players draw directly on the display. Both arrived in 1983, into a market that was already collapsing.
Dead End: Killed by Its Own Screen
Initial sales were strong enough that Milton Bradley acquired GCE in early 1983. Then the video game crash of 1983 (see The Video Game Industry) hit. A glut of consoles and cartridges sent prices into free fall, retailers dumped inventory, and the whole American home-game market contracted hard.
The Vectrex had no room to fall with it. A competing console was a cheap box that used the television the buyer already owned; the Vectrex carried a CRT inside every unit, and that display was the largest fixed cost in the machine. When rivals cut prices to clear stock, a console built around its own monitor could not follow them down. Milton Bradley reported losses of $31.6 million and discontinued the Vectrex in February 1984. Rights reverted to Smith Engineering. The European and Japanese releases (Bandai sold it in Japan as Kลsokusen, ๅ ้่น, “Lightspeed Ship”) did not change the outcome.
The thing that made the Vectrex worth remembering was the thing that killed it. Its screen freed it from the television and gave it graphics no other console could show; the same screen priced it out of a fight that had turned entirely on price.
The machine kept a devoted following long after. Homebrew developers still write cartridges for it, and in 2025 a Vectrex Mini reinterpretation with a 5-inch AMOLED screen raised over $1.3 million on Kickstarter. See The History of Displays for the wider vector-versus-raster story.