Before the Beam: Origins
The story of vector arcade games begins not in a smoky arcade but in a university lab. In 1962, Steve Russell and a group of MIT students created Spacewar! on a PDP-1 minicomputer. The game displayed two dueling spaceships on a round CRT screen using vector graphics — lines drawn point-to-point by an electron beam. It was never a commercial product, but it planted a seed that would take fifteen years to bloom.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, vector displays were the standard in military and scientific computing. Radar screens, oscilloscopes, and flight simulators all used the same basic principle: steer an electron beam to draw lines directly on phosphor-coated glass. The technology was well understood. What it needed was someone bold enough to put it in a coin-operated box.
The Timeline
Space Wars arrived in arcades, developed by Larry Rosenthal for Cinematronics. It was a direct descendant of Spacewar!, and it was the first commercial vector arcade game. Rosenthal had built custom hardware — his own vector display processor — in his garage. The game drew glowing white lines on a black screen, and it looked like nothing else in the arcade. Cinematronics sold roughly 30,000 units, proving there was a market for vector.
Atari released Lunar Lander in August 1979, their first vector game. It was a modest hit. But then, in November, Asteroids landed — designed by Lyle Rains and programmed by Ed Logg. It became the best-selling Atari arcade game of all time, moving over 70,000 units. The crisp geometric asteroids and the tiny triangular ship were instantly iconic. Asteroids proved that vector wasn't a novelty — it was the future.
Meanwhile, Cinematronics released Tail Gunner, Sundance, and Warrior — the first one-on-one fighting game, viewed from above with two knights dueling in a dungeon. The vector era was accelerating.
Atari pushed vector into three dimensions with Battlezone, designed by Ed Rotberg. Using a first-person perspective rendered entirely in wireframe vectors, the game simulated tank combat across a stark geometric landscape. The U.S. Army was so impressed they commissioned a modified version for military training — a fact that reportedly troubled Rotberg.
Asteroids Deluxe refined the original formula with shield mechanics and smarter enemies. Cinematronics contributed Star Castle — a brilliant game where players had to blast through rotating shield rings to destroy a central cannon — and Rip Off, one of the earliest cooperative two-player arcade games.
This was the apex. Dave Theurer's Tempest took vector graphics to dizzying heights — literally. Players defended the rim of a geometric tube as enemies crawled up from the depths. It was the first game to use Atari's color vector hardware, painting the screen in vivid blues, reds, and yellows. Tempest remains one of the most acclaimed arcade games ever made.
Sega entered the vector arena with Space Fury, notable as the first arcade game with speech synthesis taunting the player. Midway released Omega Race, their only vector title. Cinematronics delivered Solar Quest, a space combat game with gravitational physics around a central sun.
Atari released Gravitar, an ambitious game combining planetary exploration with gravity physics. It was critically admired but commercially challenging — players found it punishingly difficult. Black Widow brought frantic twin-stick shooting to the color vector platform.
The arcade industry was nearing its zenith, but cracks were showing. Raster displays were getting cheaper and more colorful. The detailed sprites of games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man were pulling quarters faster than glowing wireframes.
Atari released two masterpieces. Star Wars, designed by Mike Hally, put players in the cockpit of an X-wing for the Death Star trench run. Using first-person color vectors and digitized speech from the film, it became one of the highest-earning arcade games of 1983. Major Havoc, designed by Owen Rubin, combined vector space combat with platforming — a technically impressive swan song.
But the writing was on the wall. The North American video game crash of 1983 devastated the industry. Arcades closed. Budgets shrank. Vector hardware was expensive and fragile compared to raster alternatives.
The Empire Strikes Back was the last commercial vector arcade game, a sequel to the Star Wars cabinet. After 1985, no major manufacturer produced another vector arcade machine. The technology that had drawn pure light from electron beams fell silent.
Why Vector Died
Vector displays lost not because they were inferior but because they were expensive. Each XY monitor cost significantly more than a raster CRT. They were fragile — the high voltages required to deflect the electron beam at speed wore out components. And crucially, raster displays could show filled shapes, detailed sprites, and eventually photographic images. Vector could only draw lines.
By the mid-1980s, raster hardware could render geometric shapes quickly enough that the visual advantage of vector — smooth, infinitely sharp lines — was no longer worth the premium. The market chose versatility over purity.
Why Vector Lives
And yet, fifty years later, vector games retain a hold on our imagination that few technologies manage. There's something irreplaceable about a real vector display — the way lines glow with soft phosphor bloom, the way they seem to float in space rather than sit on a surface. No LCD, no OLED, no modern screen can truly replicate it.
Today, collectors restore and maintain original vector cabinets. Projects like XY display recreations use modern hardware to drive authentic vector monitors. And browser-based projects — like this one — attempt to capture the spirit of vector in software, bringing the games to new audiences.
The vector era lasted barely eight years. It produced fewer than fifty commercial titles. But those glowing lines carved themselves into the DNA of gaming, and their light — real, remembered, or recreated — never quite fades.