Riiven Reverb
Vectrex
The Vectrex arrived in October 1982 with its own vector screen and a $199 price. It sold into a market that was about to stop buying anything at all.
The Moment
It is the summer of 1982, and the console business still looks like a growth industry. At the Summer CES in June, General Consumer Electronics showed a machine that did not plug into a television. Home systems of the period competed on cartridge libraries and on how closely they could approximate the arcade on a family set. The arcade itself ran on vector graphics: bright lines drawn directly on a phosphor screen, no pixels, no color unless you added it. Electronic Games covered the Vectrex as a programmable stand-alone system, a category description that had few other occupants. Retailers were stocking deeply for the holidays. Nobody selling hardware that autumn expected the following eighteen months.
The Original
The Vectrex was a self-contained console built around a 9 by 11 inch monochrome vector-graphics monitor. Rather than sharing the household television, it carried its own display in a vertical cabinet, closer in posture to a shrunken arcade machine than to a set-top box. Color and decorative artwork came from plastic screen overlays that slid in front of the glass, tinting and framing the white lines the monitor drew. The service documentation General Consumer Electronics issued in 1982 and the later HP-3000 field service manual of 1983 describe a machine intended to be opened, diagnosed and repaired in the field, with the monitor treated as a serviceable subassembly. It reached buyers in October 1982 at $199. Electronic Games gave its conversion of Scramble a newly created award, Best Mini-Arcade Game, a category the magazine invented because nothing else in the home market quite fit the description.
The Gap · Reach failure
The Vectrex asked a retailer to explain something. It could not be demonstrated by pointing at a television, and it could not be shelved beside competitors as one more cartridge system with a different logo. Its case for $199 rested on the built-in monitor, an argument that required floor space, a powered display unit and a salesperson willing to make it. The overlays that supplied color were a further step of explanation, a sheet of plastic doing work the machine itself could not. Electronic Games had to invent a category, Best Mini-Arcade Game, to describe what it had reviewed, and the trade press struggling to name the thing was an early sign of how hard it would be to sell. Then the 1983 crash removed the conditions in which any such explanation could be sold. The Vectrex was discontinued in 1984, a casualty of that collapse, and the Vectrex Owner's Club that had published its Passport magazine in the summer of 1983 outlasted the retail life of the machine.
A console with no shelf to sit on and no category to be sold in
Watch
The Echo
The Vectrex survived through the people who owned one. The Vectrex Owner's Club was already publishing its Passport magazine by the summer of 1983, a channel for owners of a machine that stores had largely stopped stocking. Institutional collections took the argument further. The Museum of the Moving Image holds a Vectrex in its collection, dated circa 1982, as an object worth keeping rather than a discontinued product line. The Strong National Museum of Play marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2012 with a piece titled The Vectrex Turns 30. The service manuals of 1982 and 1983, written for technicians who no longer exist as a profession, remain in circulation on the Internet Archive and now serve owners who repair the machines themselves.
Why Now
The Vectrex carried its own screen because that was the only way to do what it did, and every buyer, retailer and reviewer who encountered it had to be talked through why. What are you building right now that cannot be demonstrated in the five seconds someone gives it?
Sources
- Vectrex Service Manual (1982) (1982), Internet Archive (1982) · primary
- Vectrex Passport Magazine - Vectrex Owner's Club Summer 1983 (1983), Internet Archive (1983) · primary
- Vectrex Service Manual HP-3000, 140024-1, Field Service Manual (1983), Internet Archive (1983) · primary
- Electronic Games, Electronic Games Issue 10, 1982 (1982) · retrospective
- Museum of the Moving Image, Video game console, Vectrex, circa 1982 (1982) · retrospective
- The Strong National Museum of Play, The Vectrex Turns 30, 2012 (2012) · retrospective
