How Vector Arcade Games Drew With Lines: Asteroids, Tempest and the Vectrex

The first few hundred Asteroids machines shipped in Lunar Lander cabinets. Atari had more orders than it had boxes, so it put the new game inside the old one. That tells you how fast vector games took off, and it hints at something stranger: those two games didn't draw their pictures the way your TV did. They drew them with lines, one stroke at a time.

For less than a decade, from Space Wars in late 1977 to The Empire Strikes Back in 1985, the brightest screens in the arcade were vector screens. Then they disappeared, mostly because the monitors kept breaking.

Lines instead of pixels

A normal arcade monitor of the time was a raster display. The electron beam swept the same pattern of horizontal lines across the whole screen every frame, top to bottom, whether there was anything there or not.

A vector monitor works more like an oscilloscope. The beam goes straight from one point to another and skips the dark areas entirely. Atari called its version "XY." The computer graphics business called it random scan. Players just called them vector games.

Former Atari engineer Jed Margolin explained the setup in plain terms. Two deflection coils steer the beam, one for X (left and right) and one for Y (up and down). A third circuit, the Z amplifier, controls brightness. To draw a rock in Asteroids, the game switches Z off, moves the beam to the starting point, switches Z on and traces the outline. Then it does the next rock.

Why the glow looked like that

The longer the beam sits on a spot, the brighter the spot gets. That's why the bullets in Asteroids look like tiny stars and why line ends glow harder than the middle of a line. It also makes drawing a hard real-time job: if the beam pauses even briefly, the brightness of the line changes.

Most arcade vector screens used phosphor that fades quickly, so the game had to redraw everything about 30 to 40 times a second. Add too many lines and the picture started to flicker. Margolin, who was project engineer on Star Wars (1983), says that game redrew the screen about every 24 milliseconds.

In black and white, vector lines have no jagged edges and no blocky pixels. What they can't do is fill a shape with solid color. Everything is an outline. And in the 1970s, vector displays were much cheaper than high-resolution raster screens, because the memory needed to store a full bitmap image was very expensive.

Inside the cabinet, Asteroids and Lunar Lander used what Atari called a Digital Vector Generator, with a working resolution of roughly 1024 by 768. Later games like Star Wars used an analog version that turned numbers into smooth slopes, which gave lines with no visible steps at all.

The games that defined the look

Space Wars (late 1977). Larry Rosenthal rebuilt the earlier computer game Spacewar! as a coin-op for Cinematronics, on a vector monitor of his own design. It was the first commercial vector video game and sold about 7,000 units, the best-selling coin-op of 1978. Rosenthal took a 5 percent royalty on every cabinet.

Lunar Lander (1979). Atari's first vector game had a big thrust lever with 10 levels and sold 4,830 cabinets. It's mostly remembered now for lending its boxes to the next game.

Asteroids (November 1979). Designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, with Logg doing the programming on a 6502 processor. Rains's pitch, as it's usually told, was a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up. There was no sound chip, so Wendi Allen built a circuit by hand for its 13 sound effects. Sales figures vary by source, from about 55,000 to about 100,000 machines. Atari is estimated to have earned $150 million from it.

Battlezone (November 1980). Ed Rotberg's tank game used wireframe 3D, a periscope viewfinder and two joysticks, one for each tread. The screen was black and white with a color overlay, green on the bottom four fifths and red across the top. The 3D math ran on a custom "Math Box" designed by Margolin and Mike Albaugh. It sold about 15,000 cabinets, and the US Army ordered a training version called the Bradley Trainer. Only two were built.

Tempest (October 1981). Dave Theurer started with a first-person Space Invaders and wrapped the playing field into a tube. You steered with a rotary knob through 16 level shapes, and it was the first game to let you pick your starting level. Game designer Chris Crawford wrote in 1982 that to beginners it "appears to be unwinnable." It was one of the first games on Atari's color vector system, Color-QuadraScan.

Star Wars (May 1983). Color 3D vectors, a flight yoke borrowed from the Army's Bradley Trainer, and voice samples from the film. Atari built 12,695 cabinets, its top arcade release of 1983. The designers placed the dots in the starfield and Death Star explosion so the beam's path spelled out hidden connect-the-dot messages.

Cinematronics kept its own line going too, with Star Castle (1980) selling more than 10,000 units, its biggest hit.

Why vector games disappeared

The monitors broke. A beam that stops moving burns the phosphor almost instantly, and Margolin once watched a runaway vector generator burn through the shadow mask during development and start on the glass. Atari's later monitors had a "spot killer" circuit that shut the beam off if it stopped moving. Game lockups, bad solder joints and noisy power supplies killed plenty of color vector monitors anyway. At a 1983 show, an unfinished Atari game called Quantum reportedly broke down about every 12 minutes.

Arcade operators wanted machines they could set up and forget. Vector games needed a technician. Meanwhile raster monitors got cheaper and sharper. Even the 1982 Arkie award for best arcade game went to raster Pac-Man, with Battlezone as runner-up. The Strong museum puts it simply: as raster graphics improved, developers found vector technology less appealing. Atari's last vector releases were Major Havoc (1983) and The Empire Strikes Back (1985), which came as a conversion kit for Star Wars cabinets.

The Vectrex: a vector arcade on your desk

In June 1982 a company called General Consumer Electronics showed the Vectrex at the Summer CES in Chicago. It went on sale that October for $199. Since an ordinary TV couldn't show vector graphics, the Vectrex came with its own 9-inch black-and-white vector screen built in. Each game shipped with a translucent color overlay to clip over the screen, and the console had an Asteroids-style game called Mine Storm built in.

Milton Bradley bought the company, then the 1983 video game crash arrived. The price fell to $150, then $99 by spring 1984, and some stores cleared them out for under $50. The Vectrex was discontinued in early 1984 after Milton Bradley lost about $31.6 million on it. Nobody published official sales numbers. In the 90s the rights holder let people use the software freely, and a homebrew scene has been making new Vectrex games ever since.

Why vector games look wrong on a flat screen

An LCD has a fixed grid of pixels with even brightness. It can't reproduce the super-bright dots, the way brightness changes with beam speed, or the faint trails moving objects leave behind. Emulators fake it with blur and glow effects. They get close, and they still aren't the real thing.

If you want to play properly at home, you have a few options:

• Tune your emulator. In MAME, raise the beam width and add a glow effect. The default settings on cheap builds often draw blocky lines.
• Use a real vector screen. Hobbyist boards can drive an old analog oscilloscope in XY mode from MAME. A basic two-channel scope does the job.
• Buy a Vectrex. Prices in 2026 run roughly $300 to $550 for a loose console, more for one in the box. The screen's condition decides the price, so test it first.
• Buying an arcade cabinet? Check the monitor and its high-voltage parts before anything else. And never leave a frozen vector game on with a dot sitting still on the screen.

For the arcade regulars, our shop has the Insert Coin Tee 1982 ($34.99), the EchoGrid T-Shirt ($39.99) and the Arcade Voltage Sunglasses 1983 ($29.99). For more arcade history, see the best 80s arcade games and their stories and why retro games look better on a CRT.

Questions we get

How did vector arcade games work? The monitor moved the electron beam directly from point to point and drew each shape as a line, switching the beam off between shapes. A normal raster screen sweeps every line of the screen in the same order every frame.

Was Asteroids a vector game? Yes. Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Battlezone, Tempest and the 1983 Star Wars arcade game all used vector monitors.

What was the first vector arcade game? Space Wars, by Larry Rosenthal for Cinematronics, released in late 1977.

Why did vector games disappear? The monitors were expensive to repair and broke often, while raster screens got cheaper and better. Vector arcade games lasted less than a decade.

How much is a Vectrex worth? In 2026, roughly $300 to $550 for a working console without the box, and more for a complete boxed one.

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