After a successful holiday launch, Milton Bradley took notice of the Vectrex and decided to buy GCE outright in early 1983, still maintaining use of the company name. With its strong financial foundation and worldwide reach, Milton Bradley was able to bring the Vectrex to parts of Europe by mid-year. Through a co-branding agreement with Bandai, the Vectrex also reached Japan as the Computer Vision Kousokusen, or Light Speed Ship.

"You need important resources to compete in a meaningful way in the video game market, and with Milton Bradley we will have that combination." -- Edward Krakauer, former GCE chairman, as quoted in the Boston Globe, July 15, 1982

While a very early prototype was favorably previewed and did well in magazine benchmarks, the computer add-on was never finished and released. Other upgrades and accessories that never made it out of the development stage were a type of touch-sensitive screen overlay and a color Vectrex. While a color system would have been a logical next step, the engineering challenge proved too formidable for a mass market consumer device at the time.

In early 1984, a light pen and 3-D Imager (headset) that simulated color were introduced and released in limited quantities. The light pen, which plugged into the second controller port and came bundled with the Art Master cartridge, allowed direct drawing and interaction on the Vectrex monitor. The 3D Imager came bundled with 3D Mine Storm and utilized spinning color wheels specific to a game to create one of the most convincing home 3D effects up to the introduction of more advanced shutter-based systems like those released in the late 1980s for the Nintendo Famicom (Japan only) and Sega Master System (SMS).

Unfortunately, despite a strong start and continued technological innovation, the Vectrex's success was short-lived. The Great Videogame Crash of 1984 had depressed the entire industry. Even after trying direct distribution, shuttering GCE operations, and aggressively cutting prices, Milton Bradley lost tens of millions of dollars over the life of the product line. In May of 1984, Milton Bradley merged with Hasbro, and the Vectrex was discontinued worldwide a few months later.

Callout: "We were badly hurt by Vectrex." -- George R. Ditomassi, Milton Bradley's Executive Vice President, as quoted in the Boston Globe, October 22, 1983

After product rights reverted back to Smith Engineering, an attempt was made in the late 1980s to resurrect the Vectrex as a handheld. Unfortunately, the pending introduction of Nintendo's GameBoy in 1989 put a practical stop to such plans once and for all.

In the mid-1990s, Jay Smith generously placed the entire Vectrex product line into the public domain, opening up legal, not-for-profit distribution. More good news came in 1996, with the release of John Dondzila's groundbreaking Vector Vaders, the second ever console homebrew cartridge (after Ed Federmeyer's Tetris clone, Edtris 2600, which was released in 1995 for the Atari 2600 Video Computer System.)

There has been a steady stream of increasingly impressive homebrew hardware and software since Dondzila's early work, with dozens of titles added to the Vectrex's catalog of releases. And there is no end in sight.