Atari‘s 1980 hit Battle Zone was one of the first ever video games to use 3D polygonal vector graphics to represent the playfield.

It’s a tank game, and you’re basically hunting down tanks, flying saucers, and other baddies. Shooting them before they can shoot you.

It starts out easy, then quickly becomes more difficult. The enemy tanks start shooting back much more frequently. On higher levels you have to employ fairly drastic evasive manoeuvers. You can use the scenery to hide behind as well.

Battle Zone is quite primitive by today’s standards, but it really set the bar high for shoot ’em ups back in the early days of video gaming. It’s still a challenge to play now and the use of a vector display still interesting.

Note: the grabs here are a pixellised approximation of a vector display. A real vector display would be higher resolution. I’m working on a fix for this.

More: Battlezone on Wikipedia