Less than 24 hours before its splashy debut party at Logan Arcade last month, VEC9 caught fire. Literally. The arcade game’s three creators were busy showing it off to the arcade bar’s enthusiastic staff when a crusty wire shorted and blew a transformer, setting some of the internal machinery ablaze.
VEC9’s key component is a rickety brand of technology not seen in arcade games in a generation: a vector monitor. If that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s probably because so-called “raster” graphics have become so ubiquitous in 2015 that we think of them generically as . . . graphics. Raster renders colorful visuals formed by grids of pixels called bitmaps, and it’s how nearly every digital image is displayed in 2015. That wasn’t always the case. Thirty-five years ago, vector displays were everywhere: laser shows, head-up displays in fighter planes; they’re prominently featured in the movie WarGames. Arcades were once split between games using vector and raster graphics, but the latter won the display wars by the mid-80s: they were faster, more colorful, and unlike vector, capable of displaying 3-D animation. When the technology became cheaper, manufacturers pulled the plug on vectors. Atari’s third Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1985, marked the last time a major arcade game used them.
More artifacts followed: a second screen salvaged from an old ATM machine, a ticket machine meant to print out the player’s score at the end of the game (since removed), physical buttons that flash in sync with the action onscreen, and toggle switches you’d see in the cockpit of an airplane. While I talked to him in Logan Arcade’s back room, Bailey pointed to a small instrument attached to the top of VEC9 cabinet. “Dude, you see this thing? That’s an air horn. Andy bought that when he was drunk.”
“This guy knows vector arcade games. He’s obviously friendly with trying to make new arcade stuff happen, and we had never found another place like that,” Bailey said. “And we were like, well, then, Chicago is the place for it.”
#vec9 reveal from saturday night at Logan Arcade. #wakeupyuri https://t.co/6IO0Fd10df
— adamgetsawesome (@adamgetsawesome) November 9, 2015
