Atari announces Tempestġ982 saw the release of Space Duel, Gravitar, Black Widow and Quantum – all in colour (and for the record, housed in some of Atari’s most beautiful cabinets). Capable of displaying multiple vivid colours on screen, Dave Theurer’s masterpiece heralded a new era of full colour vector displays and was a huge success. Atari’s third XY game, BattlezoneĪ major leap forward came with the release of Tempest in 1981 – Atari’s first colour vector game on it’s new “Quadrascan Color” vector monitor. “Colour” up to this point was achieved with the use of coloured gels placed on the game’s screen. The latter was the last single colour vector game released by the company. Any collector will tell you that nothing beats the glow of a vector-based arcade game in a dark room.Īfter the success of Asteroids, Atari followed up with a slew of vectors, including Battlezone (its first ever game to achieve revenue of $500 a week during field testing), Red Baron and Asteroids Deluxe.
There are no pixels on a vector display, and apart from a few exceptions, none of the shapes are filled in – this is what gives these games their unique wireframe look. Vector, or “XY” visuals are ‘simpler’ but the distinctive glow that these monitors produce is hypnotic – graphics are sharper, cleaner, brighter and more pronounced. The result is that no fading of the images produced can be seen by the naked eye. The gun is capable of redrawing these lines over and over very quickly, at multiple points across the screen. Whereas traditional raster arcade monitors house an electron gun that sweeps a beam from left to right, and from top to bottom (in much the same way you are reading this article), a vector monitor draws lines between two points.
Lunar Lander, Atari’s first vector arcade game Released in 1979, these two games heralded the company’s innovative intent, and arguably began the Golden Age of videogames. It all began with Lunar Lander and then Asteroids. With a total roster of thirteen vector releases, Atari were undoubtedly the kings of wire-frame arcade games.
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