In December 1982 BYTE opened its first look at a new games machine with unusual enthusiasm: “Here is one of the greatest game machines we have seen this year.” The machine was the Vectrex, a console with its own 9-inch screen that drew arcade-style line graphics, and the magazine credited it to “General Consumer Electronics (GCE), a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company”. GCE had been selling game watches a few months earlier. It did not design the Vectrex, and by the time the console reached the shops GCE belonged to Milton Bradley. What GCE did was back a design that a bigger toy company had turned down, ask for a larger screen, and bring it to market.
Fast facts
- Based: Santa Monica, California.
- Run by: Ed Krakauer, formerly of Mattel’s Intellivision business.
- Founded: 1980, according to public histories; certainly by the summer of 1981.
- Products: Game-Time, Arcade-Time and Sports-Time LCD game watches; the Vectrex (autumn 1982).
- Owner: Milton Bradley, from 1982.
- Closed: 1984, when Milton Bradley stopped making the Vectrex.
From Mattel to game watches
Ed Krakauer had been, in Jay Smith’s words, “the key guy for Intellivision at Mattel” before he “left to form his own company called GCE, or General Consumer Electronics”. Public histories date the company to 1980, with Krakauer as president.
Before the Vectrex, GCE sold games you wore. In June 1982 Electronic Games reported that GCE “successfully combines electronic games and wristwatches in three of the hottest new items of the year”, each at $39.95. Game-Time played four LCD games, among them Firing Squad, in which the player dodged “barrages of bullets from a six-man execution team”, and a version of Space Invaders called Alien Assault. Two newer watches, Arcade-Time and Sports-Time, added a small joystick; Sports-Time played football, basketball and soccer. Looking back in 1984, Electronic Games recalled that “no one expected GCE, which had made its reputation with game watches and calculators, to bring forth a programmable cartridge device built around a black and white vector graphics monitor”.
The Mini Arcade
The console came from outside. Jay Smith, whose firm Smith Engineering had designed the Microvision handheld for Milton Bradley, had a design for a small vector-screen game machine called the Mini Arcade, with a 5-inch screen. Smith first optioned it to the toy company Kenner, which considered it through the winter of 1980 and the spring of 1981 and gave it back that summer. He then took it to Krakauer.
“Ed was really quite a visionary,” Smith told Retro Gamer. Krakauer saw the potential at once, but asked for one change: “if it could have a bigger screen, I’d really be interested.” The production design had a 9-inch screen. The name changed as well. According to Retro Gamer, the programmer Tom Sloper suggested “Vector-X” after a brainstorming session, and it was shortened to Vectrex.
Smith’s team, with Gerry Karr responsible for much of the technical design, then had about ten months to finish the console, its operating system and twelve games, all ready for the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1982. Several of the games were licensed arcade titles: BYTE listed Cinematronics’ Armor Attack, Space Wars, Star Hawk, Rip Off and Solar Quest among GCE’s conversions.
Launch
Video Games Player called GCE “the newest and, in my opinion, one of the most significant entrants” in its survey of the consoles in September 1982, and thought the Vectrex would be “a major contender”. It stressed the point GCE sold hardest: “Vectrex is a self-contained system—meaning it is not played on your TV set.” BYTE made the same case to its readers: “you won’t have to fight other people for use of the television set. Just take your Vectrex and plug it in wherever you have an electrical outlet.”
GCE launched the Vectrex in the autumn of 1982 at about $200. BYTE praised its “superb vector graphics, excellent sound, cartridges for some of the best coin-operated arcade games”, and concluded that it “comes closer to duplicating a real arcade game than any other game system on the market”.
Milton Bradley
By then GCE had a new owner. BYTE’s December 1982 issue already called it a Milton Bradley subsidiary, and Electronic Games later dated the purchase to 1982; some later histories place it in early 1983. In Smith’s recollection, Milton Bradley “bought the whole product line, put it out in force for 1983” with television advertising aimed straight at Atari and the Intellivision. GCE’s name stayed on the product: 1983 advertisements for the Vectrex were still copyright General Consumer Electronics, Inc., of Santa Monica.
Milton Bradley gave the Vectrex distribution that GCE could not have managed alone, in Europe and, through Bandai, in Japan. It could not protect it from the collapse of American console prices. Electronic Games reported that the price fell from $200 to $150 and then $100, which was still not enough to sell the machine in profitable numbers, “because of the high cost of producing the unit’s built-in vectorscan monitor”. Milton Bradley stopped production in 1984. In June that year the British magazine Big K reported that it was “dumping redundant stock at low prices” in America. According to Retro Gamer, Milton Bradley closed GCE a few months into 1984 and sold off the remaining stock.
Afterwards
When GCE closed, the rights to the Vectrex hardware and software went back to Smith’s companies, and Smith later made them available for non-commercial use. New games have kept appearing since: Retro Gamer credits John Dondzila, who started in late 1995, as the first person to write a homebrew Vectrex game.
Sources
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 4, June 1982, pp. 62–63, Joyce Worley on game watches: GCE’s Game-Time, Arcade-Time and Sports-Time, $39.95 each.
- Video Games Player, vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, pp. 59–60: GCE as “the newest” entrant; the Vectrex as a self-contained system.
- Pamela Clark, “The Vectrex Arcade System” (First Look), BYTE, vol. 7 no. 12, December 1982, p. 92: the review quoted above; GCE as “a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company”; the licensed Cinematronics games.
- Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 8, October 1983, and Video Games, vol. 2 no. 2, November 1983: Vectrex advertisements, “© 1983 General Consumer Electronics, Inc. Santa Monica, CA 90401”.
- Big K, issue 3, June 1984, p. 8: Milton Bradley “dumping redundant stock at low prices” in America.
- Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 13, July 1984, p. 9: “Milton Bradley drops Vectrex”, the purchase of GCE in 1982 and the $100 price. Vol. 2 no. 14, September 1984, pp. 82–84, “The King of Stand-Alones Has Abdicated”: GCE’s reputation “with game watches and calculators” and the price cuts from $200.
- Mat Allen, “Retroinspection: Vectrex”, Retro Gamer, issue 35, 2007, pp. 18–23: Jay Smith, Gerry Karr and the Mini Arcade; Kenner’s option; Krakauer’s request for a bigger screen; Tom Sloper and the name; the ten-month schedule and CES 1982; Milton Bradley’s purchase and distribution; the closure of GCE; the rights returning to Smith; John Dondzila.
- The Dot Eaters, “Vectrex” (web, secondary): GCE founded in 1980 by former Mattel executives, with Krakauer as president. https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=console%2Fvectrex
- Bill Loguidice, “A History of Gaming Platforms: The Vectrex”, Gamasutra, 17 December 2007 (web, secondary): the purchase in early 1983 and the shuttering of GCE’s operations. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-history-of-gaming-platforms-the-vectrex