The Vectrex was a interesting games system distributed by Milton Bradley (better known for their board games) back in 1982. It’s short-lived lifespan ended in 1984 when the videogames market crashed taking many games companies with it. The Vectrex was never a huge seller because of this, but probably never would have been due to it’s unique selling point. The Vectrex was built around a vector graphics display, which no other console before or since has attempted.

So what’s a vector display then? Games consoles normally work using some variant of a bitmapped display, which put simply means that the screen is split into a rectangular grid of pixels. Each pixel can potentially be changed by writing to a particular area of the consoles memory which gets read and converted into a screen display line by line from top to bottom. A vector display on the other hand doesn’t have the concept of a pixel. Instead, the screen is displayed by directly controlling the position of the electron gun to draw lines. If you’ve ever played classic arcade games such as Asteroids or Battlezone, you’ll have seen a vector display in action.

The Vectrex comprised a vector display with a built in joypad, and took ROM cartridges. The display was only black and white, so each game also came with a sheet of tinted acetate which you put in front of the display to tint the colour of the lines and make the games a bit more interesting to look at. Some games may even have had fixed level layouts marked out on them, to allow the Vectrex to draw more moving images. One of the problems with a vector display is that each line drawn must be repeatedly drawn otherwise it will begin to fade away, which is why a lot of vector based games of the time tended to have a large degree of screen flicker. The Vectrex also had a built in game called Minestorm, which was an Asteroids clone.

The Vectrex also had a couple of add-on peripherals including a light pen, and the 3D Imager, a headset that predated VR technology. The Imager was a higher tech method of printed 3D with those silly acetate glasses. The Vectrex would draw lines on screen, and a rotating disc in the image blocked the image from one of your eyes. When the disc was in front of the other eye, a slightly different set of lines were drawn, and so you ended up with a 3D effect of the lines coming out of the screen at you.

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