10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles You Never Knew Existed

Of all the many consoles released in the early eighties, Milton Bradley’s Vectrex is by far the most interesting. An all in one console with its own screen it boasted analogue controls and 3D vector graphics among its features, really setting it apart from the opposition.

The Vectrex was very much trying to copy the classic vector arcade games of the time such as Asteroids and Battlezone. So when Atari upgraded their own vector hardware to a colour display to produce titles such as Tempest and Star Wars, it was only natural that MB would want to follow. So they soon commissioned Smith Engineering (the people behind the first Vectrex) to come up with a full-colour version of their console.

Unfortunately, the Vectrex wasn’t the success MB had hoped and was one of the first victims of the famous North American video games crash, causing the company to lose millions of dollars. Not willing to sustain those kind of losses, the Vectrex was quickly discontinued and any hopes of the Colour Vectrex were definitively quashed.

Only one early prototype of the Colour Vectrex exists, a standard machine that has been modified to support just three colours, a far cry from the planned machine.