Milton Bradley
Board games go digital
Board game giant Milton Bradley entered video games with the Vectrex and various licensed titles, bringing traditional gaming expertise to the digital age.
Milton Bradley, the American board game company behind The Game of Life and Battleship, made an ambitious foray into video games. Their most notable contribution was the Vectrex, a unique vector-graphics console with built-in display. While the video game division didn’t survive the 1983 crash intact, the Vectrex remains a beloved curiosity.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1860 by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts.
- Video game era: 1979-1984 (primary activity).
- Key hardware: Vectrex (1982).
- Acquired by: Hasbro (1984).
- Legacy: board game adaptations continued under Hasbro.
The Vectrex
A unique console:
- Built-in display: monochrome vector monitor.
- Vector graphics: crisp line-based visuals.
- Colour overlays: plastic screens added colour.
- Library: Mine Storm, Scramble, Star Trek.
- Market timing: released just before the 1983 crash.
⚠ Milton Bradley did not develop the Vectrex. BYTE’s first look, December 1982, is unambiguous: the machine was “developed and distributed by General Consumer Electronics (GCE), a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company” — see GCE — at $200, built around a Motorola 68A09 processor. GCE was already MB-owned at launch, so this is not a case of buying in a finished product; but the design was GCE’s, not Milton Bradley’s. The distinction matters because the Vectrex is the most interesting machine Milton Bradley ever sold, and it was somebody else’s design.
The death, reported live
Big K, June 1984, caught the end as it happened, and the detail is better than any retrospective:
In America, Vectrex [company] Milton Bradley has stopped production of the system and is dumping redundant stock at low prices. It has, however, [promised] to continue servicing units.
The British end of the story is the part worth keeping. The magazine went to MB’s British operation for confirmation and got a stonewall: Vectrex sales manager John Garner “would only confirm” that the system had been discontinued in the US, adding that “we’re reviewing our marketing strategy”.
A console discontinued in its home market while the importing subsidiary declines to say whether it is discontinued here — that is what a hardware withdrawal looked like from the buyer’s side in 1984, months before anyone would write the word “crash” about it.
What it was going to become
Worth recording because it did not happen. The Italian magazine Computer Games, April 1984, reports that Milton Bradley, as “producer and distributor of the Vectrex system”, had already planned “the production of a module that would transform this console into a home computer”, and that the machine was designed to accommodate a voice synthesiser.
The Vectrex is remembered as a curiosity that arrived too late. The plan was for it to become a computer, which is the same plan almost every console manufacturer of the period had, and almost none delivered.
Video game ventures
Beyond the Vectrex:
- Microvision (1979): early handheld with interchangeable cartridges.
- Licensed games: Battleship, Simon (electronic game).
- Publishing: various NES and SNES titles.