Last Updated on November 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
Forty-one years ago this month, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this blog post, I’ll explain how changing times led Milton Bradley to make a transformational bet at the worst possible time that ultimately sunk the company, and what happened to what was left of Milton Bradley.
Milton Bradley was all over my childhood. I played their board games like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and Connect Four practically every time I visited my cousins. I received a Pocket Simon electronic game for Christmas one year. But nothing Milton Bradley made captured my imagination quite like the game Battleship. After my cousin Brian and I spent practically a whole weekend sometime in early 1982 playing game after game, when it was time for me to go, he mentioned there was an electronic version of the game.
That got my attention. “It’s expensive though,” my uncle interjected.
The next time we went to Kmart, I found it. The price tag was an amount I couldn’t fathom at my young age. My mom and I think it was around $60. Mom told me how long I would have to save my allowance to get one, because I wasn’t old enough to know how to do the math yet. So I started saving.
But due to a situation beyond my control, involving a Milton Bradley product even more expensive than Electronic Battleship, I almost didn’t get it.
Milton Bradley’s dilemma
Milton Bradley had been making board games since 1860, and other paper toys like the Bumpalow Village for nearly as long. They got into electronic games in a big way in 1978 when they released Simon, a fast-paced electronic match-the-pattern game that became one of the hottest selling toys of that year’s holiday season. Simon was so popular, Milton Bradley resorted to selling known non-working units at full price to parents just to have something to put under the tree, with a promise to make it right after the fact. Milton Bradley also sold the first handheld cartridge game console, the Microvision, starting in 1979.
But Milton Bradley’s revenue peaked at $420.7 million in 1980. In 1982, its revenues were down to $360.2 million and profits were down to $19.2 million.
After shelving a project to develop a game console internally, they made a bet-the-company move to acquire General Consumer Electronics in early 1983. GCE had the exclusive distribution rights to a promising new video game console called the Vectrex. And make no mistake, it was promising. During the 1982 holiday season, when the companies were already negotiating, GCE had sold its entire first production run, perhaps as many as 147,000 units.
It was a debut everyone could be proud of.
Why Milton Bradley wanted a game console
The home video game market created a bit of a crisis for the makers of conventional toys and games for children. The toy industry was scared, and rightfully so. Video games captured the imagination of children in a new and disruptive way. Arcades sprung up in suburban strip malls and any kind of store where someone might have to wait would put one or two arcade machines somewhere in the store for patrons to amuse themselves 25 cents at a time.
A line in Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of the Police song King of Pain made reference to being right next door to Willy’s Fun Arcade. It was a convenient rhyme, but he captured the essence of the moment. In the early 1980s, it seemed like everything was near an arcade.
Atari was cleaning up. Not only were they producing hit arcade games, but they also had the best selling home video game console. And they were creating home versions of those games, and licensing the rights to make home versions of several other companies’ arcade hits. In their commercials, they were asking a simple question: have you played Atari today?
What other toymakers did
There was immense pressure to find ways to capitalize on the craze. Some toymakers created game consoles of their own. That’s what Mattel and Coleco did. Parker Brothers licensed everything in sight, and hired programmers and put them to work creating home versions of everything they could. Soon, they were producing home versions of an impressive collection of arcade hits including Frogger, Popeye, and Q*Bert, and home video games based on the Star Wars movies. Parker Brothers was a sister company of Kenner, so they knew full well how Kenner was cleaning up on that craze.
Kenner, incidentally, had been talking to the inventors of the Vectrex in 1981, before GCE agreed to distribute the console.
How the Vectrex was special
The majority of second generation video game consoles were derivative. But nothing about the Vectrex was derivative. There was never another console like it. Not before, and never since. That probably had something to do with why it sold out its entire production run so quickly.
The basic formula for a game console
The hardware of every game console going all the way back to the simplest TV games of the early 1970s had one basic job. That was to display objects on the screen called sprites, track their movement, make it easy to move them quickly, and detect when they ran into each other. And then they needed to draw that movement one line of pixels at a time, starting at the top of the screen and moving down, 60 times per second. 50 in Europe.
As long as your hardware can do that, you can implement pretty much any two-dimensional video game.
You can sum up the second generation of video game consoles as a series of companies attempting to accomplish this task cheaper than Atari did, better than Atari did, or late in the generation, sometimes a little bit of both.
How the Vectrex was completely different
Except for the Vectrex. The Vectrex dispensed with that entire formula, including connecting to a household TV set. Every other console that came before or after it worked the same way as a TV set, drawing the display one line of pixels at a time, starting at the top left of the display and moving down a single line at a time to the end of the display.
The Vectrex got its name from the concept of vector graphics. Vector graphics work differently, drawing objects as a series of lines that start and end at any point on the display. It was especially effective for 3D wireframe graphics. With no pixels, the lines were sharp and fluid and could scale to any size without losing fidelity.
A number of popular arcade games used vector graphics, and adapting them for use on home consoles and home computers was always challenging. The Vectrex made it possible because it had its own built-in dedicated vector display, making it possible for a consumer product to do vector based graphics at home for the first time.
It was new and novel and revolutionary in 1982. And that wildly successful holiday season of 1982 made it seem like it might be the next big thing. After all, it went right up against Atari and Coleco’s newest consoles that season, and GCE sold every unit it had, at $199. And Milton Bradley had international distribution channels, so there was every reason to believe they could take it worldwide and have an even bigger year in 1983.
Inventors of the Vectrex
The Vectrex was conceived by John Ross of Smith Engineering in late 1980 after he and four coworkers found a small CRT in a surplus warehouse and wondered about making a small electronic game. They created a small vector graphic display with it, initially intending to create a handheld device.
After shopping the idea around, Smith Electronics licensed the system to General Consumer Electronics for distribution in September 1981. The two companies had a prior relationship, with Smith making watches for GCE. GCE suggested a larger screen, so the Vectrex evolved into a tabletop device with a 9-inch screen. After a whirlwind 9 months, they unveiled the system on 7 June 1982 at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago and released it in November 1982, just in time for the holiday season.
The Vectrex’s display couldn’t create colors, so GCE devised plastic overlays with color to place over the screen to give the playfield color. It worked surprisingly well. And it aged surprisingly well. It no longer looks state of the art today like it did 40 years ago, but the display still looks novel and captivating.
In total, the Vectrex had a library of about 30 titles available, including a built-in game, a clone of Asteroids that was much closer to the arcade version than the official version available for Atari consoles, since the original used vector graphics.
And it had buzz. Writing in the March 1983 issue of Radio Electronics, contributing editor Danny Goodman called it the console to beat.
What happened to Milton Bradley: The unhappy ending
Sadly for Milton Bradley, they bought in while the market was at its pinnacle. And while 1982 was a great year, 1983 was a terrible year. The market for home video games fell out from under every US-based company. Sales started slowing down, and video games went from something stores kept in locked cabinets to close out deals sold out of large bins placed haphazardly throughout stores in hopes of getting attention. Milton Bradley cut the price from $199 to $150 and then to $99 in an effort to prop up sales.
Milton Bradley lost $16.5 million on the Vectrex in 1983. By February 1984, losses had climbed to $31.6 million. Milton Bradley discontinued the console and cancelled development of new games. They sold the entire inventory to mass-market discount houses, who liquidated it a fraction of the console’s introductory price.
At the time of the discontinuation, Smith was working on a successor, a Vectrex with color vector graphics. They had a functioning proof of concept, but were working to get the color display to refresh quickly enough without the price being prohibitive. The rights reverted to Smith, but they moved on to other things.
On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley agreed to be acquired by Hasbro in a deal worth $350 million, or $50 per share. Analysis at the time blamed electronic toys for Milton Bradley’s declining revenue and its need to find a merger partner. Milton Bradley isn’t the first name that comes to mind when it comes to the 1983 video game crash, but it was one of the biggest and earliest casualties.
On September 7, 1984, Hasbro closed the deal, ending Milton Bradley’s 124-year run. The two companies had synergy and the combined company proved successful, with $1.2 billion in revenue in 1985.
How many Vectrex units sold
Based on analysis of the serial numbers using the German Tank Problem method (the same used to estimate the rarity of the Commodore 1581 disk drive), hobbyists estimate somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 units sold. No official sales figures are available.
How the Vectrex almost kept me from getting my Electronic Battleship
Meanwhile, back in 1983, I was hyper-focused on saving up for Electronic Battleship. I knew nothing of the Vectrex or anything else Milton Bradley was up to. And I’d stayed out of the toy aisle while I was saving, so I wouldn’t be tempted to spend the money on something else. So, unbeknownst to me, they lowered prices on other products in a desperate attempt to generate enough cash flow to make it to the next quarter. Including Electronic Battleship.
I saved my allowance for about six months to pull together $60. When I had enough, Mom took me to Kmart to buy it. It was half price, and I don’t think there were all that many left. If I’d been a week or two slower, there might not have been any for me to buy.
Of course, since it was half price and they did have inventory, I went home happy. I had my game and half my money left over.
The Vectrex after Milton Bradley
Even after Milton Bradley moved on, it took a while for the Vectrex inventory to clear in the sales channel. I found a story of people seeing them at Kay Bee Toys for $45 for the console, and the games for $3 to $5 each.
After the cancellation, the Vectrex rights reverted back to Smith Engineering. Smith was kind to the community that sprung up around the ill-fated concept, and in 1996, they released technical documentation and released all of the software to the public domain so that anyone could freely copy it and study it.
Because it arrived so late in the generation and wasn’t on the market very long, it’s rare and sought after today. And it’s still giving up its secrets, decades later.
In late 2020, a former Milton Bradley engineer brought a stash of old Vectrex gear to a game shop in Harftord, Conn. Included in his collection were some unreleased prototype games that were nearly finished when Milton Bradley pulled the plug. The purchaser, Sean Kelly, saw the games through to release and released them in late 2023.
Being the only vector graphic based console to ever hit the market gives it a certain mystique. Holding on to some of its secrets nearly 40 years only adds to that mystique.
What happened to the Milton Bradley brand
Hasbro continued to use the Milton Bradley brand until 2009. In 1991, Hasbro purchased Tonka, who by then also owned Parker Brothers. This brought two old rivals together under the same corporate umbrella. Hasbro initially continued both brands, but dropped them both in 2009 in favor of the Hasbro name. My kids probably have no meaningful recollection of the Milton Bradley name. But they played most of the same timeless Milton Bradley games that I did, including Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Connect Four, and yes, Battleship. The logo in the corner of the box was different, but the games remain the same.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
there were long line at the malls to go play a store demo of Vectrex and Mine field