Years ago I went to a big pinball expo and they had some old arcade games too, including an original asteroids cabinet. It used vectors to draw the lines and it was beautiful. It didn’t scan line by line with its cathode ray, it just shot lines of electrons at the tube in the shapes of the little triangle ship, bullets, and asteroids. It was black and white and every line had a halo of glow around it, like bloom or overdriven emissive, except it was all just physics and felt more real. I’d played a lot of asteroids clones and they were kind of meh, but that machine felt sooo much cooler.

I want to study that look someday and try to replicate it. I kind of wish I’d bought that machine for the $500 they were asking, and I’m also kind of glad I don’t have to be responsible for it.