Vectorbeam

Vectorbeam was a brief but historically intriguing venture born of a dispute at the birth of vector-graphics gaming. Its founder, Larry Rosenthal, was the engineer who had designed the display and processor behind Cinematronics' landmark Space Wars, the first commercially successful vector arcade game. Feeling inadequately rewarded for that foundational work, Rosenthal split from Cinematronics and established Vectorbeam around 1978 to develop vector games on his own terms.

Despite its short life, Vectorbeam is remembered for one remarkable title. Warrior (1979) pitted two players against each other as sword-fighting knights rendered in stark vector lines, viewed from overhead with an unusual mirror-and-artwork cabinet that projected the combatants onto a painted arena background. It is widely cited as one of the very first one-on-one fighting games, a genre that would not truly flower until the following decade, making Warrior a genuine conceptual ancestor of the fighting game. Vectorbeam also produced Speed Freak, an early first-person driving game notable for its detailed vector scenery.

Vectorbeam's independence proved fleeting. Within roughly a year of its founding, the company and its assets were reacquired by Cinematronics, the very firm Rosenthal had left, closing the circle. Warrior itself was subsequently released and associated with the Cinematronics catalog. Vectorbeam vanished almost as soon as it had appeared, a footnote-sized company whose single fighting game nonetheless earned it a lasting place in the lineage of the arcade.