International Play Your Vectrex Day is November 1!

Kid with nose pressed against a Toys ‘Я’ Us display case, back when there were TЯU’s and display cases; that was me, though I wasn’t really a kid. What I was, was poor. I’d loved the vector graphic arcade games for years — Asteroids, Battle Zone, Star Trek, Star Wars, Omega Race, Space War, so many more. The Atari 2600 I had wasn’t the same.

I bought the ColecoVision instead. It could play all my Atari 2600 carts and also had a bunch of cool arcade ports on it. I never stopped wanting that Vectrex, but I was working my first ever programming job that just barely covered rent and my school loans.

I didn’t really think about it for the longest time, not until I started going to retro gaming conventions. More often than not, there’d be some Vectrex games locked away. Sometimes there’d even be one of the consoles, usually for some eye-watering price. One con even had a retro gaming console museum — there, amongst the Odysseys and IntelliVisions was a real live Vectrex.

I started haunting fleaBay until I found a working one at a reasonable price, and I bought it.

I’ve picked up a few games over the years. Loose carts aren’t hard to come by, but complete-in-box games with the necessary acetate overlay in good condition are much scarcer. I’ve had it sitting in its custom slip case waiting for me to have a good space to set it up permanently.

Then a couple of days ago, a Random Stranger on BlueSky mentioned the console and I got excited:

Th… there’s an International Play Your Vectrex Day? So it seems!

It seems insane that this old box still has enough fans to make this a thing. Maybe not as surprising as all that — Vectrexes are used in some game design courses. There is a thriving aftermarket for games, repair parts, legal multi-carts that contain all commercially released games as well as a bunch of fan games. The Vectrex supported a light pen and a cool 3D attachment that used a spinning disk to multiplex a left and right image.

The video game crash killed the Vectrex. It was released at the end of an era in home video gaming and was dead and gone by the time the NES resurrected the home market.

I maybe made a song about the Vectrex. You should listen to it.

To participate in International Play Your Vectrex Day, all you need to do is, well, play your Vectrex. Still plenty of time to grab one if you need one. There’s a bunch of Vectrex emulators, so the games can be played even if you don’t have a Vectrex, but you’ll only get an honorable mention on the Vectrex wiki.

According to the IPYVD regulations, turning on your Vectrex, playing it, and sending the organizer a list of games played is all you have to do.

There was also Vector Wars, a contest to get winning scores on specifically chosen Vectrex games run on original hardware. According to J. Geek Spizzax, Vector Wars was timed to run concurrently with IPYVD in order to remind people to turn on their Vectrexes. As if I needed a reason.

I’m not certain Vector Wars is still happening; the list of past tournaments on the Wiki ends years ago. But that’s fine.

For IPYVD, my number one game would be Spin Ball. That thing is a masterpiece. Pulling back the plunger with the analog stick, smashing (gently) the #4 button to fire it, #2 and #3 buttons for the flipper… it just all makes sense. I could play it for hours, and have.

I was hoping the Star Trek game would be like the arcade version, a top down game that played similarly to the old 1970s text adventure, but it isn’t. It’s a first person shooter, which is okay, but it’s not the game I wanted. It’s unfortunate that most of the really famous vector arcade games, like Star Wars, just were never ported to the Vectrex. Star Castle was, though, and is really cool.

I bought a music game last year at Retro World Con. It required a light pen, which I don’t have. But! Aftermarket replacements are available. Retro World Con is coming up in September; I might try to score one and try some light pen games for the Vectrex.

The 3D games, though — I don’t think you can get the 3D unit today at any price.

So. I’ll leave this here, for now. I’ll be back on International Play Your Vectrex Day with the list of games I played, and maybe some videos.