Gaming memories: meeting someone that had a Vectrex

Do you even know what a Vectrex is? Well, chances are that you don't. It was only around for a little while, didn't sell very well, and fell victim to the videogame crash of 1982 along with everyone else in the industry.

It was actually a pretty remarkable machine but it was one of the first casualties of the apathy that came along with the "crash" and therefore, most people never even knew it existed.

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When I met Jon Barry in my neighborhood as a 12 year old, I could tell that we were going to get along pretty quickly. I guess video games are just something that kids started talking about immediately but it wasn't long before we were hanging out almost every day. I don't recall how long I was hanging out at his place before he drug this thing out of the closet but I had followed video games about as well as a person can in the 80's and even I had never heard of this thing.

It was pretty nuts and really ahead of its time.

All Vectrex machines had their own attached CRT monitor and it was meant to be vertical, which was a good thing because you may recall that while most TV's at the time were landscape, arcades were almost always portrait. There was no real way to rectify this other than to buy arcade machines, which nobody was really going to do.

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The controller was extremely advanced given the time period of "one button controller" in that it had 4 buttons as well as a control stick (not a joystick) that while a much more simplistic thing, functioned very similarly to home controller control sticks of today.

The graphics were all drawn lines which is called a "vector display" and if you looked close enough you could see that all of the dots and lines were being drawn as you played. It was fine though because we had very low expectations at the time.

Because this machine is unable to produce any colors, every game had a plastic sheet that needed to be attached to the screen and this would give the game the color necessary. Sometimes the sheets would also contain certain "walls" our boundaries that the game had in it as well. It's all very basic sounding today, but at the time of Pac Man and Asteroids, this thing was actually a lot better than any other home system that existed at the time.

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It was released at a pretty high price point for the time period at $199 as that would be nearly $650 in today's money. However, the Atari 2600 had launched 3 years earlier for the same price and didn't come with an attached monitor, so people were kind of used to paying this much for a home system and this was just seen as the normal price for a console.

But just take a moment to think about that for a second ok? We see a lot of complaints about the Xbox, PS, and Switch being "too expensive" but they are all actually considerably less expensive than consoles were in the 80's if you adjust for inflation.

Someone needs to get this YouTuber a voice coach but he has an impressive supply of games, that is for sure.

Today a Vectrex machine is pretty tough to come by and if you do find one and want it for your collection you are going to have to pay thousands of dollars for it. Here's the thing though... of all the Vectrex machines in existence today, most of them still function because it was just a very well-made machine. I think it would have done a bit better had it released at a different time. Atari kind of spoiled everything for everyone in the early 80's... hell they even spoiled things for themselves. Vectrex would have been steamrolled by Nintendo in 1985 anyway because that was just the perfect home system. It would have been nice if Vectrex had seen a better rollout though because it was a pretty solid machine that was just made available during a very unfortunate time.

John Barry and I would play with this thing for a couple of weeks off and on but since it was already the early 90's at this point the games were a bit too dated to stay interested in them for long. It was kind of just a nostalgic throwback to how arcades were because in the early 80's home system versions of arcades were pretty shitty compared to the originals. With no RPG's, no ability to save, and a very limited library, we ended up putting it back in the closet where it was discovered after a short amount of time.

I am glad I got to at least experience it myself though because it was a pretty remarkable little machine.