Sundance

Cinematronics built its cabinets around vector graphics, meaning displays that did not fill a raster of pixels but steered the beam directly along lines. The result was a sharp, luminous image no raster monitor of the period could match. Sundance, released in 1979, belongs to that family and came from the circle of a designer responsible for several of the company's more unusual games.

What makes the title interesting is how little it resembles the mainstream around it. Instead of shooting invaders it works with a grid of fields and objects the player catches and moves, which makes it a game about timing and reading movement rather than about reflexes. In 1979, when arcades were filling with variations on space shooting, that was a pronounced departure, and it remained a marginal entry rather than a hit.

Technically Sundance is worth attention from anyone interested in vector arcade hardware. That was a brief window, closed as soon as raster displays gained colour and adequate resolution. The characteristic look of these games is only approximated in emulation today, because the glow of phosphor on a vector screen cannot be reproduced faithfully.

You can run Sundance here directly in the browser. The sensible approach is to treat it as a historical exhibit: a few minutes are enough to understand the principle and to compare it with what arcades were playing a year or two later, when the genre landscape had already shifted considerably.