Context

     MineStorm premiered with the Vectrex system at the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, with a sales release date slated for November of the same year. With the growing, global popularity of public video game arcades starting in the early 1970s, many companies were developing and producing home systems in the hopes of mimicking or even improving upon a product that was already proven successful. Most notable of the home systems that predate Vectrex is the Atari 2600. Premiering in 1978, the Atari 2600 experienced unprecedented success and made Atari, Inc. the fastest growing company in the US at the time. Many of the cartridge games available for the 2600 were arcade games the consumer would already be familiar with, like Asteroids and Pac Man. In 1982, Atari released the 5200 home arcade system in an effort to keep up with a growing home computer market. The 5200 was intended to complement the 2600, but it proved a commercial failure, the principal complaint of consumers being the lack of compatibility for cartridges between the systems. In the wake of this failure from the leading home arcade system manufacturer in the world, Christmas of 1982 seemed like a perfect time to launch a novel competitor. Vectrex sold well in its first few months and garnered mainly positive reviews from professionals and consumers alike. Most praise was centered on the remarkable technology of the small vector screen, responsive controls, and the Asteroids-genre game experience found in MineStorm. 

     1982 and ‘83 were landmark years for the video game industry. As tech improved and became more accessible, the market flooded with home arcade systems. The variety of options available at increasingly competitive pricing drove down the general value. While home computers like the Atari 400 and the Texas Instruments TT99/4A were still more expensive than many people could afford, they were catching up to arcade systems in gaming quality. For many consumers, the choice between buying an expensive machine that would only run games and buying an expensive machine that would run games and perform a host of other tasks was becoming an obvious one. In late 1982, bargain games for arcade systems, shoddily slapped together and rushed to release, began flooding an already bloated market, driving down the value of more sophisticated games even further. In early 1983, companies began folding their game divisions entirely and selling off stock at basement rates. Many shifted to developing games for home computing as it became clearer that was where the market was headed. A stock crash resulted that would hit the United States hardest, but would also impact markets in Japan and the UK. Swept up in this crash, whose impact would continue into 1985, were a variety of gaming systems that simply couldn’t get a foothold in a drowning industry. Vectrex was perhaps the most short-lived of these systems, as others like Coleco Industries’ ColecoVision and Mattel’s Intellivision fared slightly better and managed to leave a legacy relatively widely acknowledged by today’s gaming industry. 

     Ultimately, the crash helped encourage the development of affordable home computers and propelled innovation in the video gaming industry. It would also endanger the existence of games produced for systems that wouldn’t survive its devastating effects. MineStorm, being a hard-coded, cartridge-free game, is entirely dependent on whether or not Vectrex still exists. By the time Vectrex production was pulled by Hasboro (who had acquired Vectrex’s parent company Milton Bradley in early 1983), only an estimated 600,000 units had been manufactured in the United States.