The only console that drew in light. The Vectrex carried its own vector screen, needed no television, and died in the crash — then lived forever on the strength of a permission slip. This page is its complete story.
New games for it, still: the Vectrex Christmas homebrew releases.
Its fellow casualty of the same crash: the Atari 5200 hub.
Monitor health, the famous buzz, controller potentiometers, overlays and multicarts, a five-check buying checklist and hedged 2026 prices for the self-contained vector console.
A trench run older than its fame, pinball in light, two footballs, the light-pen twins, a submarine rescue and three homebrew landmarks: ten deep cuts beyond the famous names.
Vector Vaders to Vector Pilot, Dondzila to the Vectrex Academy: a survey of the second library — the homebrew scene that gave a 1984 console a release calendar.
No pixels, no grid — just a beam steered point to point. How vector drawing works, why it cannot be perfectly faked, and why the last home vector monitor will not die.
A spinning wheel that conjured colour and 3D from a monochrome tube, and a pen that turned the screen into a sketchpad and a piano: the Vectrex’s wildest hardware.
Tinted plastic as display hardware: how the Vectrex’s printed overlays carried colour, coded information and turned a monochrome tube into a theatre of light.
The classic sector-defence campaign with a glowing first-person viewscreen: defend the bases, mind the energy, and plan for the mothership.
Fly a cosmic hawk down a great web, capture twenty species for your trophy room, and shoot only what guards them: the collecting shooter before collecting was a genre.
Namco’s qualifying-and-grid classic rebuilt as a vector game: the honest Pole Position, with Mount Fuji presiding over a circuit of light.
The library’s driving game: a windscreen view, true perspective traffic and the analogue stick’s finest early argument.
A maze-chase where you play the bank’s vacuum cleaner, the cash fills your bag, and a full vacuum is a slow vacuum: one great system, honestly executed.
One post, one rotating chamber, and threats converging from every direction: the library’s purest panic, five fierce minutes at a time.
Tim Skelly’s pirates are coming for your fuel, and only two tanks working together can stop them: cooperative play’s founding document.
Cinematronics’ salvage shooter: race the aliens to stranded survivors in the ring of space around a blazing central star.
A spiky hero, a kidnapped Molly and genuine digitised speech from a sound chip: the library’s most charming cartridge, squeaks and all.
The connoisseur’s cartridge: defend a fortress at the foot of a glowing canyon where your own shots ricochet home, in GCE’s darkest original.
GCE’s cavern epic that travelled from home console to arcade: explore the maze, destroy the station, then escape it as it explodes.
From MIT in 1962 to Cinematronics to your desk: two ships, one star, and gravity as referee, in the founding document of vector gaming.
Konami’s scrolling shooter drawn as a single line of light: the fuel-tight, terrain-mean run to the base, in the finest home version of its generation.
The purest arcade experience in the library: besiege a rotating three-ring fortress and thread one shot onto its cannon, in the definitive home version.
Stern’s maze shooter without its famous voice but with everything else: robot crossfire, electrified walls and Evil Otto, drawn in perfect vector light.
Cinematronics’ tank duel in a wireframe city: one shell at a time, a helicopter that ignores walls, and a two-player mode that turns a good port into a great one.
The game inside every Vectrex: an escalating Asteroids evolution with magnetic mines, fireballs and a minelayer, judged as the finest built-in game of its era.
Its own screen, lines of pure light, and a forty-year second life built on permission: the complete story of the Vectrex.
