NEWS

Retro Gaming Retrospective

We’ve been big fans of gaming since way way back. Whether playing Combat on the Atari 2600 or Bruce Lee on the Commodore 64, there’s really not too many games or gaming consoles we haven’t mastered. That’s partially why we’re loving Gamasutra’s multi-part history of gaming platforms. This time around they tackle one of the coolest and probably most obscure free standing consoles ever: Vectrex. The machine had a 9×11 inch black and white screen, a controller with a joystick and 4 buttons (that also folded nicely under the screen), and if you wanted some color you had to slide in those color film overlays. It also came with an Asteroids-like clone built in called MineStorm and took cartridges. Sadly, it was bad PR that ultimately led to it’s demise:

Debuting just two years before The Great Videogame Crash of 1984, it soon joined many lesser systems in the bargain bins of toy stores across the nation. The media was saturated with reports and speculations about the demise of the videogame industry, and the Vectrex was sucked into the vortex of bad publicity and uninformed opinion.

And although it didn’t even come close to garnering the mass appeal that the 2600, Intellivision, and later, the NES enjoyed, it does, till this day, have a cultish underground following of devotees and collectors who still know what’s what.

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