6. The Joy of Vectrex.

Finding that perfect Christmas present for someone becomes a bit of a dilemma once they’re over a certain age. About twelve, my poor beleaguered parents would no doubt say. I could be an ungrateful brat on occasion, and sometimes they must have regretted the day I flopped out into the world with an overactive imagination and the attention span of a goldfish.

The previous year had witnessed a catastrophic failure of present-sensitivity, with the top honour going to a computerised Hornby train-set controller called a Zero 1. To this day I don’t recall it ever working properly. It might have had something to do with isolated points, or carpet fluff on the rails… or it might have just been down to our general incompetence at setting it up…

Nice buttons and knobs. Nasty present.

Whatever the reason, it was a shit present. But I didn’t have the heart to tell my dad that I really wasn’t bothered about model railways. By nature, I was a Scalextric boy. That said, I hadn’t bought so much as a set of pick-up ‘brushes’ for my Scalex cars in almost a year. I had a new addiction, and this one gobbled my paper-round money before I’d even made it as far as the model shop.

We’d had a rare family outing that autumn. Earl’s Court had played host to some consumer electronics show, and while my parents compared the respective merits of VHS and Betamax video recorders, I wandered off in search of an Atari VCS or Mattel Intellivision, hoping for a rare sighting of either of the new pretenders to the home console throne – Colecovison and Vectrex. Sure enough, the Colecovision was there, sporting some distinctly non-arcade-quality renditions of Zaxxon and Space Fury, and also some atrocity based on The Smurfs. Hardly the future now, was it?

Web Wars. Tempest… in your home. These things mattered.

But then I came across Milton Bradley’s gloomily lit, covered enclosure (a stab at seedy arcade ambience, I imagine) that was packed with Vectrexes. By this point, I was in the full flush of my Tempest obsession, and it only took one game of Web Wars before I knew I wanted a Vectrex very, very badly.

I spent the whole day hiding in the MB enclosure, trying every game for the system, with only a brief emergence for a limp sandwich and a stint at winning a Pink Panther mug by playing Port Man on the JVC stand (the one and only time I have ever made a profit from videogaming). I decided there and then that the next couple of months would see a concerted effort to ensure a Vectrex appearance under the tree at Christmas. If my parents were left to their own imaginations again, Heaven knows what strange and inappropriate things I would be unwrapping.

Cosmic Chasm. Sony wouldn’t like it.

Surprises are all well and good, but I knew as soon as I saw the hulking box looming behind all the other presents on Christmas morning that the less-than-subtle Vectrex Heavy-Hint Campaign had paid off. I was absolutely fucking ecstatic. Most of my other relatives had been corralled into getting some games for me, too – Cosmic Chasm, Scramble, Berzerk and the beloved Web Wars I had been dreaming of. For once, I didn’t care whether the arcade was closed over the holidays. I had my own arcade right here at home, and the perfect excuse to avoid a glass of cheap sherry and the traditional chilly walk after lunch.

Instead, I sloped off to my room, thankful for the late afternoon darkness, and huddled over my new toy. Mine Storm, the built-in game, was a marvel in itself – a cool spin on the Asteroids theme. It was fast, frantic and cruelly difficult – just like my favourite coin-ops. Cosmic Chasm was the loveliest vector coin-op that never was (only years later did I discover it was eventually coin-oppified – a super-rare colour version from Cinematronics). It relished in using all four buttons AND the analogue joystick offered by the Vectrex – total bliss for this Defender Boy. Every game I had for it was a winner – even Blitz, with its peculiar depiction of American football, especially once I’d sussed how to beat it to the point of getting the scores into hexadecimal.

”Oh, bollocks. I thought it was a proper telly…”.

My Vectrex only failed me once. It was sometime around New Year, when the sound suddenly died. My dad opened it up and found that a wire had dropped off. A quick dab of solder later, and I could finally exhale.

Over the years, my other old consoles and computers have succumbed to numerous ailments, never to return to full health. There’s a cupboard full of them in my house – an Intellivision with a cracked controller, a C64 which only displays colour on a Wednesday, a BBC Model B that flickers LEDs and gives off a mild acrid scent…

The cupboard of lost computer soooouuuuuuls. In Fuseball’s house.

The Vectrex never joined them. Sure, it would fly off the eBay shelf for a more-than-decent whack, but MB’s quirky masterpiece means a lot more to me than a boost to my bank balance. It was the greatest present I was ever given, and it has never relinquished its hold on me. My parents knew it too, and Christmas the following year brought my first stereo, which is another story…

FUSEBALL, May 2004.

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