When I was seven or so years old, this now-primitive (but at the time, quite amazing) self-contained video game system always drew me in, like Odysseus to the sirens. They had one set up at the toy store at Frederick Town(e?) Mall, whose original name I can no longer remember- and I doubt it's even there anymore. This simple little machine was a vector graphics system, only drawing lines instead of colors or full sprites- think back to the original Asteroids or Battlezone games from Atari- they too were vector gfx machines. Anyway- just for fun, I thought I'd poke eBay to see what was out there. The prices for working units with controllers, game cartridges, and screen overlays (if you click the link, you will see what I mean) are relatively astronomical- although I'm pretty sure the sticker price on these units was $200 when they came out, so for the early 80s they were super pricey then too.
If you're actually interested in seeing what I'm talking about, here are two links:
Vectrex available on eBay
Wikipedia entry on Vectrex
By today's standards however, these game machines are probably as exciting as playing with a cribbage board, while not knowing how to play cribbage.
One more thing. While I was window shopping, I found this- a damn good looking Zaxxon stand-up coin-op machine. Zaxxon was an infuriatingly tough game but the graphics were good for the time, and you really felt like you were in the little spaceship, down in the trenches, shooting fuel tanks and incoming missiles with your single diminutive little laser.
Zaxxon on eBay
(I always thought that Zaxxon and Donkey Kong Jr. were the two main, and perhaps the only two good, reasons that anyone should buy a Coleco Vision. Popeye was just plain dumb.)
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