Vectrex reborn: How a chance encounter gave new life to a dead console

The chance encounter

Steven Salter is a relatively recent addition to the Vectrex club. He bought his first system in 2017 and has since added two more to the stable. "I wanted two, but then I lucked into a third one for dirt cheap, and I would have been stupid to pass it up," he said.

Like so many of us, he caught the video game collecting bug, working to keep historic systems like this alive. Now, thanks to a random encounter, he is now part of gaming history, making one of the most significant Vectrex discoveries of all time.

Salter was hanging out with a friend at a local gaming shop outside Hartford, Connecticut. While there, an older gentleman came in to see about selling some gaming devices.

We'll call this man Mr. Smith because he has no interest in being attached to the story. Both Salter and Sean Kelly identified him as a former high-ranking engineer at Milton Bradley who, after the termination of the Vectrex, found himself in possession of boxes of random stuff related to the system.

He had come into the game store looking to sell some Vectrex games and accessories. The manager said that his store didn't deal with systems quite that old, but instead of sending Smith packing, he waved over Salter.

Salter bought a few Vectrex games from Smith on the spot, who then said: "I have a whole bunch more stuff in my collection. It's just sitting on the shelf. It's time to part ways with it."

Intrigued, Salter exchanged numbers with Smith and later drove to his house.

Salter was most interested in buying a sealed 3D Imager from Mr. Smith, a sort of oddball, pre-Oculus headset that used a spinning, multi-hued disk to not only add depth to Vectrex games but color, too. These headsets are so rare that sealed units sell for thousands.

But while going through Smith's collection, Salter found something different: a developer's cartridge.

"This wasn't even a cartridge in a shell," Salter said. "It was just the bare PCB, and the ROM board on it was actually a socketed chip." It was the sort of thing a developer would use to test games in active development.

It had only one marking, a white sticker with a curious, misspelled title: "A Crush of Lusifer."

Salter carefully popped the unprotected shard of silicon into his Vectrex and became the first person to play the game since it was apparently abandoned by its developer some 40 years earlier.

What he saw was an odd game, a sort of proto-Star Fox where you fly forward through a simulated 3D environment, avoiding or shooting obstacles before ultimately facing off against a crazy, floating head that is, presumably, the fallen angel himself.

Having never heard of the game, Salter posted a quick video on the "Vectrex Fans Unite!" Facebook group to see if anyone else had heard of the title. Nobody had. This created a minor disturbance in the retro-gaming Force, a bubble of excitement that did not go unnoticed by Sean Kelly.

Salter got a Facebook message and then a call from Kelly. "He calls me up and says, 'I've never seen that before.' And I'm just, like, floored because if there's anyone who would have seen it before, it would be him," Salter said.

Further testing revealed that the game was incomplete, again pointing to it being actively in development when the Vectrex was canceled. Kelly purchased the still-incomplete game for an undisclosed sum and set to work bringing it to release.

This, though, would be a little trickier than usual. Most unreleased games had some semblance of retail packaging or at least documentation describing what the title was supposed to be. With A Crush of Lucifer, there was nothing beyond that misspelled sticker.

Thankfully, Kelly didn't have to look far to find someone to help create the crucial missing pieces needed for retail release, including the manual and overlay. Salter had some design experience and handled the creation of the overlay graphic, taking inspiration from another classic 3D title: Star Wars: TIE Fighter.

Salter also wrote a few snippets of story, like this bit on the box:

An incredible evil force has reigned supreme over your world for far too long. What was once a utopian paradise is now a near featureless ruin.

But Lucifer's days are numbered. If you can dispatch his outer defenses and make it to the Netherworld portal, you can face the evil one himself! Will you be victorious in crushing Lucifer's tyrannical rule and restore your world to peace and tranquility?

As stories go, it's no The Last of Us, but then character development wasn't much of a thing in early '80s console gaming at the best of times.

Kelly, meanwhile, oversaw the finishing of the game itself, hiring some coders and, eventually, getting the thing into production, going through numerous overseas printers before he found the perfect manufacturer for boxes, inserts, and overlays. It's the overlays that proved particularly troublesome.

"By the time I finally got a printer to do it properly, I think I had gone through four or five different printers and over 100 failed samples," Kelly said. "They just couldn't get it right. It costs a lot of money to make those overlays."

Taking it home

A Crush of Lucifer was released in 2022, which is where my loose connection to this story comes in: I bought a copy. At the time, I had only a few Vectrex games, a half-dozen discrete titles which actually made up the bulk of the library that anyone could legitimately amass. A Crush of Lucifer, despite its period-appropriate packaging, was something wildly different.

First was the cartridge. Its transparent shell sets it apart from the usual dull gray plastic used on Vectrex cartridges. The demonic red PCB and the LED that glows within give it the feel of an artifact that maybe shouldn't have been uncovered.

But it's the gameplay that's most distinctive. This really does play like a title from another era, something of a preview of what was to come in titles of the '90s and beyond, games like Space Harrier, After Burner, and Star Fox.

I was as intrigued as I was confused at first, dodging endless obstacles in the barren 3D landscape, one leading to the next until—finally—Lucifer himself emerged.

The end boss's horned visage, simplistic though it may be, is more than a little unnerving. The giant head floats before you, spitting out attacks you must intercept. Eventually, a crack appears in his skull, your cue to go on the offensive.

It's all familiar stuff, even for modern gamers, which makes it all the harder to play A Crush of Lucifer without thinking what might have been had the Vectrex succeeded.

Granted, a monochrome CRT video game console priced 50 percent higher than the competition wasn't destined for commercial greatness, regardless of the industry's health. However, game developers never really had a chance to unlock the system's potential. After all, look at the massive graphical advances made between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3. Both are on the same system, but one offers radically improved graphics and gameplay.

That level of progression would have been something to behold on the Vectrex and maybe enough to have encouraged further development of vector-based graphics. Had all the stars aligned, perhaps modern gaming would be less about dots and more about lines.

Regardless, Sean Kelly believes that the Vectrex will always have its charm.

"People can still look back at Vectrex today and say: 'Wow, this is cool,'" he said. "I can't really do anything like this on any other platform. And even if I try, it's still not quite the same."