Vectrex
Vectrex
- Vectrex - 1982-1984
- Also known as the Milton-Bradley Vectrex
System History
In October 1982, General Consumer Electronics (GCE) released the Vectrex for $199. The Vectrex wasn't just your average game console, however, and even to this day there has never been a videogame system quite like it. With its built-in vector monitor and detachable control board, the Vectrex captured a sleek look and feel that would be duplicated 2 years later with Apple Computer's release of the Apple Macintosh.
Atari's Asteroids arcade coin-op. The Vectrex was a completely vector graphics based system, hence its name. Vector graphics are the kind of graphics used in such popular games as Asteroids, Battlezone, Space War, and Tempest. Most videogames use raster graphics, which utilize pixels. In this type of display, the beam inside your televsion or monitor scans across horizontally from the top down, drawing each row of pixels. Vector graphics, on the other hand, draw to exact coordinates - using x/y or "vector" values. Vectors graphics are very sharp and allowed the Vectrex to produce some outstanding visual effects such as scaling and rotation. To produce its special graphics, the Vectrex had its own nine by eleven-inch monochrome monitor (color vectors would have been very difficult and expensive to produce).
The Vectrex originated at Western Technologies/Smith Engineering, when some of the engineers wanted to find a way to use a bunch of the cheap cathode ray tubes (CRT's) they had just purchased. An all in one vector gaming system was decided, and the rest is history.
Originally called the Mini Arcade (which is the feeling the Vectrex was trying to capture), a company by the name of General Consumer Electronics (GCE) decided to lease the Vectrex and market it after a name change of course.
To help capture that home arcade feel, and to compensate for the lack of color, plastic overlays were provided with each game. Permanent overlays were a common place in arcade games of the 1970's, where most games were black and white. If a video game manufacturer wanted color, they would literally affix colored cellophane strips to the monitor screen, such as was done in Atari's Breakout or Taito's Space Invaders. Likewise, if the playfield was to be to complicated to draw (be it in detail, or a color problem) because of the graphics limitations of the time, overlays could be used to render permanent backgrounds or give ambiance. Still other overlays would be on the plastic screen of the arcade game and would add anything from exciting borders to game instructions. The Vectrex overlays would slip on and off the Vectrex screen, and would provide some of all of the above.
The Vectrex controller was also designed with an arcade experience in mind. The rectangular box was large enough to be stable and sit on a desktop or a lap. Mounted on it were 4 fullsize arcade buttons and a sturdy top heavy joystick. The joystick was also designed to fit neatly in to a compartment beneath the Vectrex screen, allowing the Vectrex to remain quite compact when not in use.
When the Vectrex shipped in 1982, it included a built-in game, Mine Storm (from the Asteroids genre). A recessed handle allowed the unit to be easily picked up and carried, although its heavy weight kept it from being a true "portable" system. Still, families liked the Vectrex since its built-in screen allowed it to be played without tying up the family TV set.
No, they're not on anything. Really. In March of 1983, Milton Bradley decided they wanted to get into the videogame business and purchased GCE, thus acquiring the Vectrex. Milton Bradley, with it's already established games distribution channels, quickly expanded the Vectrex's distribution overseas. By summer 1983, distribution had begun in Europe and Japan, but by then end of that year the great video game crash had occured and the industry was feeling it's effects. Milton Bradley closed down GCE and decided to distribute the Vectrex itself, discounting it as much as possible (first $150, then $100). This plan lasted until March of that year when they discontinued sales in Europe and slowly phased out the U.S. the rest of that year. They eventually released all rights back to Smith Engineering. It's speculated that Milton Bradley washed it's hands of the Vectrex like this to look more attractive to Hasbro (whome they would merge with by May of that year), who was not interested in entering any area of video games.
The Vectrex did show up again a few years later when Abel & Associates converted the Vectrex into an "entertainment device" for use in malls or pizza parlors. For a quarter, you could have the machine perform the "Luscher Color Test" (yeah, that's a great application for a monochrome machine), in which you would pick colors in the order that they appealed to you. Then the machine would tell you about your personality. Wah hoo. Vectrex machines have also been found converted into heart-monitoring devices as well.
The Vectrex came close to coming back from the dead in 1988, when Smith Engineering considered resurrecting the Vectrex as a handheld unit. Milton Bradley thought the $100+ price tag of the unit would make it unsellable, so the idea was scrapped. Nintendo's Game Boy was released the following year and enjoyed huge commercial success, but somehow the handheld Vectrex concept was never revived.
Life After
Today, Smith Engineering has graciously condoned the not-for-profit distribution of any of the Vectrex's duplicable materials, including games, overlays and manuals.
Because of the system's uniqueness, it has inspired a loyal group of Vectrex fanatics who have churned out emulators, web pages, and even new games. Foremost among these Vectrex programmers is John Dondzila, whose first ever contribution to classic console gaming was the 1996 Vectrex game Vector Vaders. Dondzila has gone on to produce several new games, including All Good Things, Spike Hoppin', and Patriots. In 1999, he produced the first ever 64K Vectrex game, Vecmania, which contains several different games all on one cartridge. Sean Kelly at one point sold a Vectrex multicart - a single cartridge that contains almost the entire library of Vectrex games, but as of 2007 he seems to be out of business (please contact us if you know otherwise). Others have produced Vectrex versions of Frogger and Galaxian, among others, making Vectrex possibly the most supported "dead" console, second perhaps only to the Atari 2600.
Games
There aren't really any famous Vectrex games, probably because the system never got to be too popular. But there were some pretty good games, including the Scramble port, Web Wars, Fortress of Narzod, Polar Rescue and Cosmic Chasm. The latter was one of the first home games to be ported to the arcade (usually, it's vice-versa) due to a unique licensing agreement with arcade game designer Cinematronics.
The version of Minestorm that shipped with the Vectrex actually had a major bug in that if you got to level 13, the game would crash. If you complained to the company, you would be sent a bug-free version of the game (Minestorm/II) free of charge. Few people did this, apparently, since Minestorm/II is rarely seen today.
By far the strangest anomaly of the Vectrex library is the elusive Mr. Boston promotional cartridge. It is a slightly modified version of the game Clean Sweep, apparently designed as a promotion for the "Mr. Boston's" chain of liquor stores in the eastern US. At least two copies are known to exist; one has its own screen overlay, and both contain production ROMs, indicating the cartridges were commercially produced.
Accessories
The most interesting accessory for the Vectrex was the 3-D Imager. Literally the first in the gaming industry to have 3D, the goggles also solved the color problem with the Vectrex. Using a removeable spinning disk (each 3D game had it's own special color wheel) inserted inside the glasses, and a complicated timing mechanism, the wearer would be immersed in 3D color vector graphics. This did create one problem though - because it was a spinning disc, it created a gyroscopic effect. If you turned your head suddenly, it would often cause the disc to want to stay put and run in to the edges of the glasses. Of interesting note, when Sega introduced their own 3-D goggles for the Sega Master System several years later, in their TV ads they initially advertised their goggles as being the first. The ad was pulled shortly after for obvious reasons.
There was also a Vectrex Lightpen, which allowed you to draw on the screen and came packaged with Art Master, a drawing/doodling program. Two other innovative titles were released for the light pen - Melody Master (a music program that allowed you to write notes on the screen and have them played) and Animaction (an animation program).
Neither of these accessories sold in very large numbers, and as a result are incredibly difficult to find today (especially the 3-D Imager). Most of the planned Vectrex accessories weren't released. There was supposed to be an add-on that would turn the Vectrex in to a full fledged computer, but it never came out. GCE did demonstrate it at the '83 Summer Consumer Electronics show, and it was to include an extra 16K of RAM, 65 key keyboard, built in BASIC, and use special "wafer tapes" for storage. Other planned accessories included a touch-sensitive screen (a prototype is known to exist), a printer, a disk drive, and even a modem. A color Vectrex prototype was shown at the 1999 Classic Gaming Expo.
John Dondzila sells a Sega Genesis controller modified to work on the Vectrex on his website. This is good news for Vectrex fans since the standard controllers are somewhat prone to breakdown and replacements are nearly impossible to find.
Rob Mitchell sells Atari 2600 paddles modified to work on the Vectrex, giving a smoother experience for Pole Position and other side to side movement games.
Emulation
The first Vectrex emulator was DVE (short for DOS Vectrex Emulator). It's pretty good-it even has support for overlays and the light pen-but it's no longer strongly supported. The MESS emulator seems to be the platform of choice for future Vectrex emulation projects.
Classic Gaming Expo 2000: Vectrex Keynote Address
Hawkins and Sloper tell it like it was.
The second keynote address at Classic Gaming Expo was delivered by Bill Hawkins and Tom Sloper, a pair who were instrumental in the development of games for the famous Vectrex system. Sloper, who started out at Western Technologies (the development company behind the Vectrex) as a modelmaker working on the company's "Gametime" watch series, is best known for designing Bedlam and creating the Vectrex's familiar mascot, Spike. Hawkins, a programmer for Western Technologies, was responsible for such Vectrex games as Bedlam, Star Castle, and Cosmic Chasm.
Hawkins began the presentation by describing how he came to be a part of the Vectrex team. For him, it had started when he was an Electrical Engineering student at Georgia Tech, interviewing for his college co-op. He described his phone interview with Ed Smith, Western Technologies' Manager of Engineering: "At the time, I had an Ohio Scientific computer, which was 6502-based, and it had BASIC in it... and as soon as I mentioned that I had written some videogames for that, I knew at that point I had the job. I could tell by Ed's reaction."
So it came to be that Hawkins left Georgia to join the Vectrex development team in Los Angeles. The audience laughed when he commented, "I never really was quite sure why they came out to Georgia Tech to get people to work in Los Angeles, other than maybe they figured we didn't know anybody there and they could lock us away and we would work without interruption... and we pretty well did."
From there, Hawkins and Sloper touched on a variety of subjects related to the history of the Vectrex. Lots of intriguing facts were revealed, such as the origin of the Vectrex name or Hawkins' work on a promotional version of Web Wars for Newport Cigarattes. Read on for some of the main themes of their presentation:
A legend is born: The origins of the Vectrex
At one point in the keynote, Hawkins offered some intriguing background on the birth of Vectrex. The audience learned how Western Technologies moved from handheld electronic games to a revolutionary idea in home console gaming. They learned that the origins of Vectrex as surprisingly humble. "One of the guys who was a hardware designer, John Ross, was going around some surplus places and had come up with a little one-inch CRT that I think was used in a heads-up display for aircraft," said Hawkins. "He found it in a surplus store and brought it in, and he thought it would be a cute thing to make a little handheld game that would use that. Western Technologies, being a development house, rather than just develop something like that they shopped it around. Originally, I think Kenner picked up the idea and said, 'Yeah, we like it, but make it a five-inch CRT.' And then they came up with a thing that looked like a Commodore PET with the CRT sitting up on a little stand and the controls down there [below the CRT]. Kenner subsequently cancelled the development plans, and [Western Technologies] went and shopped it around again. And GCE said, 'We like it, but make it a nine-inch CRT.' And that's how it came about."
Later, Hawkins described how the console came to have its now-famous name. "When I started working, it was being called 'Mini Arcade,'" he said. However, another company released a toy called Mini Arcade, so a new name for the console was needed. At one point the machine was to be called "Vectron," and Hawkins even designed a startup screen that displayed this name.
Of course the console was never released with that name, and Sloper told the story of how the name "Vectrex" came to be. By this time, the unnamed console had been licensed to General Consumer Electronics (GCE). "So then we had one of those corporate brainstorming sessions with the president of GCE," said Sloper. "We're all talking about what to call this thing. I'm a big fan of 'B' science-fiction movies and I kept coming up with things... I said, 'It's a vector-based machine. Let's call it something with "Vector" in it, like "Vector-X," or something.'" Nobody at the meeting cared for that name, but Sloper pressed on. "I said, 'Well, you can always like, y'know, squeeze things together: "Vectrex," or this or that.' We made a list, we put it on the whiteboard, and eventually they kind of winnowed down the list and decided to call it 'Vectrex.'"
Let the games begin: the Vectrex dev system
Rip-Off screenshot It didn't take long for the subject of the discussion to turn to games, and Hawkins started out by describing the development system he used to create them. "The first game I did was Rip-Off," he explained, "and at that point, there really was no standard computer [for development]. What we had for a computer were S100-based CPM systems, and there were no hard disks. You used 8-inch floppies... you had two floppies, and one floppy was the operating system, the other floppy was your data disk. It took me a lttle over three months and 12 boxes of disks to do Rip-Off. The second game I did was Cosmic Chasm, and since all the other programmers were out of town, I stole two of the drives off somebody else's computer and had four disks on [my system], and so I could pull stuff back and forth a lot easier... Cosmic Chasm was done in six weeks on one disk."
Prompted by further questions from the audience, Hawkins described the early days of Vectrex development, before the console's hardware had even been fully designed. At that time, programmers had to rely on oscilloscopes driven by prototype boards to simulate the vector graphics-producing capabilities of the finished Vectrex console. Using an emulator developed by Vectrex engineer Gerry Karr to simulate the Vectrex's 6809 processor, programmers were able to run assembled program code on the oscilloscopes to get a picture of what their software would look like on an actual Vectrex screen. Hawkins stated that this system was in use for only two months or so, until development hardware that was closer to a finished Vectrex console became available. The early development system was for the most part reliable, however. Hawkins said that the only real problems sometimes showed up in the aspect ratio of the screen, since the oscilloscopes were square and the actual Vectrex monitor is more rectangular.
Immediately after Hawkins had shared this piece of Vectrex history, an audience member asked if he still owned any of the original emulator systems. It turns out that he does. "When the whole company shut down," Hawkins said, "I had taken the system back to Georgia, and I was working out of my house there. They said, 'Can you send all your equipment back, 'cause we're trying to sell stuff out and close the company down.' I said, 'Well, wlll you sell it to me?' And they said, 'Sure! What would you like to pay for it?' And ultimately I picked what I thought was a fair price - probably way high - and they let me keep my equipment."
Later, an audience member asked if Hawkins ever uses his old development system any more. He answered, "I have had it on within the last five years, but mostly it sits under a bench." However, he does have backups. "I copied everything over to a PC several years ago, so I have that," he said. "That's my only 6809 emulator, though, so if I were to do any game work again..."
"Feel free!" exclaimed the questioner from the audience.
Game design and the birth of Bedlam
Bedlam logo A lot of classic gamers are curious about how game ideas made it out of designers' imaginations into actual development. According to Sloper, the process was not as complicated as one might think. "What we would do is we would have sort of high-level brainstorming sessions with the president of GCE [Ed Krakauer]. And he'd say, 'OK, what'cha got?' And we'd trot out our game ideas and he picked the ones that he liked, and we'd go and make those."
This answer prompted one audience member to ask, "What are some of the ideas that didn't make it?" Sloper modestly replied, "I don't remember havng any that didn't make it," and got lots of laughs from the audience.
When an audience member asked Sloper about his inspiration for Bedlam, his answer was quick and to the point. "Tempest," he said. "Bedlam is Tempest turned inside-out." Then, Sloper revealed an essential strategy for game designers: "If you're having a hard time coming up with an idea, just go the arcade. Play some games, fiddle with the ideas, turn them around and go, 'OK, what if we did...?' And that's basically it."
Tempest and Bedlam
Hawkins, who did the programming for Bedlam, added, "The original name for Bedlam was Castle Keep, and Tom had envisioned that as a castle on top of a hill, and you've got ramps going up to it and these things are coming up to attack you. You start off with two ramps, and then you get more ramps, and then it would start rotating, things like that... One of the guys who was a programmer who did Scramble [for Vectrex], Paul Newell - he'd already left the company, but he came in one night and could see what I was doing [for castle Keep]. He had a slightly different understanding of it, and didn't visualize it as a castle on a hill, and he said, 'What if those ramps would shorten up, and things would start coming at you closer?' And I said, 'Oh God, that would really be rough to do. I don't know how I'd wanna handle it.' So I sat down, and because of rotation, I'd done everything in polar coordinates. So it was just a matter of turning the radius in a little bit. And so, I went ahead and programmed that up to see how it looked, and I thought it was pretty good. Jay Smith and Tom had come in to check on things, and Jay said, 'Oh, I really like that!' And Tom said, 'No, this is not my vision; this is not the way I want it to be.' Jay said, 'Overruled.'"
Sloper obviously remembered the incident, but it didn't seem to bother him. He revealed that wasn't the only time his opinions about Bedlam were overridden. "That turned out OK, I think. I remember... one of the hard parts was comeing up with a final title. We got around one of these big, high-level brainstorm sessions, trying to come up with a name because it had been decided that the name Castle Keep wasn't going to be kept. Basically, you had a thesaurus, and you start going, 'OK, so it's like: it drives you crazy! It's madness! It's bedlam! It's this, it's that.' And I said, 'No, no, no! Don't call it Bedlam, whatever you do! It's got the word "bed" in it. It'll make people think it's gonna make them sleepy!' So they said 'overruled' and off he made it."
From the arcade and back again
Vectrex was well-known for its translations of arcade games, particularly those of legendary vector-game producer Cinematronics. Hawkins had this to say about translating the Cinematronics games to the Vectrex: "We had the arcade games... and as far as Rip-Off went, I actually had the source code for that. And I had a contact person at Cinematronics I could call and ask quesions about [Rip-Off]. That was kind of helpful, because this was my first real serious project in the world, and it was a good starting point to look at what someone else had done."
Cosmic Chasm screenshotCosmic Chasm, hwever, is a well-known reversal of the usual translation process. It was the first home videogame to be ported to a coin-operated arcade game. Since Hawkins programmed Cosmic Chasm, it was only natural that he had some comments about the game. "Jeff Corsiglia did the initial design. The way we had things set up at Western Technologies, we had a game designer who came up with the overall concept and then it got handed off to the programmer, and he may or may not have had a part as well in working with that [game design]. In this case, it was just me and Jeff working on it, and Jeff came up with the original design, and of course it was up to me to translate that into something that could actually be implemented on the machine."
Hawkins continued, "Originally, there was this map and you've got the different rooms you go into. Originally, Jeff wanted that generated on-the-fly, and they would be a different maps every time you went in. Ultimately, we compromised on having the same number of rooms in the same positions and then different pathways that would be there or not, in terms of coming up with something that would be different each time. He basically came up with the concept and the overall game design; what it ended up to be was more the capabilities of the machine and what I could do with it. I think it was pretty close to his concept, but there were a few things that were different."
Arcade Cosmic Chasm screenshot Earlier, Hawkins had had this to say about Cosmic Chasm's trip to the arcade: "Part of the deal they had with the licensing of other games from Cinematronics is that we get our choice of games that they had - titles that we can use - and in return, they had the option to take any of our original games that they liked and put it on the coin-op. Cosmic Chasm was one... it was an original game, and certainly at the time we were doing it, we did not know that it was going to coin-op. But after Cinematronics looked at it, I guess they liked it enough to do that. I only saw the [coin-op] very briefly. I was back in Georgia Tech at the time. And it showed up in an arcade there. And it was there for three or four weeks before they took it out, and I never saw it again. Of course, it came out about the same time that Dragon's Lair did, and they [Cinematronics] had a lot more emphasis on that. I know it [Cosmic Chasm] made it, but I don't know how big it was for Cinematronics."
Screen overlays: A Vectrex shortcoming
Bedlam Overlay One topic that came up frequently during the discussion was the Vectrex screen overlays, which frequently don't seem to add as much to the games as they should. Audience members wanted to know how much input game designers had when it came to making the overlays. Sloper responded, "We mainly concerned ourselves with the game itself. Overlays existed to give the game some color."
Later, Sloper elaborated, "The one thing that the overlay really adds to a game is it helps you understand what the little pieces of information at the top or the bottom of the screen are, and it also has little indications at the bottom about how to use the buttons on the controller... [An overlay] was seen as important because otherwise it was just too dry, black-and-white. It added color. And this is the 1980's - we've gotta have color!"
Hawkins added, "The trouble is, the overlays should have been designed from the beginning. And then, we could code around it, knowing what parts of the screen were obscured by different legends and things. Unfortunately, the game was done, and then they did the overlays. So, we didn't know what anything would be, and a lot of times, they had put labels up there that would cover up parts of the screen that we had things on. And so, it was a lot of trouble for us programmers to go in and restructure things to get clear of that. So, ultimately, none of us [programmers] used the overlays, and I don't think I've ever put an overlay in a Vectrex."
Hawkins also indicated that the system of development in place at Western Technologies didn't allow for much cooperation between the game developers and Miva Filoseta, the lead overlay designer. "There was a great rift with Miva and the programmers when these things first came out... overlays never really were designed with the game. They had nothing to do with the game, and in fact, in a lot of cases, as programmers we didn't like them. At one point, we were thinking about putting a message up on the screen that said, 'For improved gameplay, remove the overlays,'" he said. Audience members laughed in agreement.
Vectrex gets in your face: The 3-D Imager
Vectrex 3-D Imager A major point of interest for Vectrex fans is the elusive 3-D Imager, a goggles-like contraption that sits on a gamer's face. A spinning color wheel flashes in front of the eyes, and creates 3-D effects when used with special games. Sloper had this to say about the Imager: "John Ross was the guy who came up with that, and becuase he understood that three-dimensionality is perceived through the use of two eyes... all you have to do is prevent one eye from seeing an image so that the other eye is giving it one perception while the other eye then can get the other perception. The color wheel did have a few little problems, like there's the gyroscopic effect: it's a spinning wheel on your face, and when you turn your head, it wants to stay that way and the edges hit [your face]."
One of the audience members asked if 3-D Imager designer John Ross didn't have a nose, referring to the color wheel's tendency to scrape against players' noses when in use. This got big laughs from the audience as well the presenters. Sloper answered by saying, "John had a big nose, actually, and I don't think his big beard actually was even involved with... what we called in those days the '3-D Viewer.' I think that a lot of the shortcomings of the 3-D Viewer were cost-reduction features. It had to be able to be manufactured cheaply and kind of generically. I wear glasses, so it's always a challenge for me to wear the thing too."
All good things come to an end...
One of the closing questions answered by the presenters was what Western Technologies or GCE could have done differently to make the Vectrex more popular, to perhaps extend its commercial lifespan. Both Hawkins and Sloper indicated that they believed the Vectrex had enormous potential, but that several factors contributed to its decline.
Vectrex advertisement Hawkins said, "My impression at the time: we had a lot of playtesters against Atari and Intellivision, and every time we did, we came out on top resoundingly. Of course, we were running the play tests. But, we had a perceived better display, and parents liked it because it didn't tie up the TV. What happened was: GCE was a small company, and they were shopping to be sold. They were start-up people. They wanted to build the company and get out. They sold it to Milton Bradley, and at the time, they had already booked national advertising, and they were ready to go out... I actually bought stock in Milton Bradley, 'cause I thought if this thing goes then I want a piece of it. The stockholder reports for Milton Bradley said that they were trouble because the electronic games were taking off and they were heavily into board games. So they were expecting the Vectrex to pull them out of their slump. And then, what happened when they bought GCE was that they pulled all the advertising. They said, 'Well, you know, we don't know what's happening with the game industry, so let's lay back for a while.' So, ultimately [Vectrex] didn't get any kind of real push."
Sloper concluded his answer by saying, "I think the critical factor in the death of the Vectrex was the timing, because at the point where Milton Bradley bought GCE, it was 1983, and... we had just crested the hump in the popularity of videogames. The first videogame boom-bust cycle was very steeply up. And then, with E.T. and Pac-Man, it hit the top and started down, and it came down hard and fast, and the Vectrex just went with it. So I think if there was anything to do over again, it would be to do the Vectrex sooner next time. But, there won't be a next time because we're not gonna do that again. It's been down, it's been up and it's all pretty much leveled out - videogames are here to stay."
Certainly, no one is going to argue with that.