Artist Greg Freres offers some interesting information about the evolution of a design team:

Vector was a bit of an experiment when it came to the design philosophy at that time. We were in the midst of trying to save pinball from the video monster and I'm not sure who it was, but the idea of working as a complete "team" was introduced as a concept to hopefully improve upon the design from the ground up by allowing more ideas to flow into the process. Before this the design group would build whitewoods, play them, tweak them, and then decide which of them would become the next game. Some of the games had more input from art or marketing from the inception, like Xenon, but for the most part the games would get blessed by Norm [Clark], etc and get sent to the art department for the finished theme and package.

With Vector, I recall having meetings with a team of maybe five to ten people, including Greg Kmiec and people from other areas, maybe sound, mechanical, and electrical included (?). Greg was the project leader and we all brainstormed together to come up with unique features, the theme, and other design elements.

Greg Kmiec summed it up this way:

Bally tried an experiment of "team designing" games. Each team had a designer, programmer, artist and solid state/sound person on it. The goal was to design a game with everyone's input. I remember that VECTOR was one of the games that came out of the team design concept because I was the designer on that team. As you can tell by the number of features on it, VECTOR was indeed designed by committee. The experiment was abandoned after each team's first game.

I do not remember any of these games with bill acceptors being regular production. These look like lab samples or conversion kits.

At the time the desire was to come up with a way to take dollars. The 25 cent coin slot was not capable of generating sufficient revenue and operators wanted a way to accept dollar bills.

Our research had shown resistance in getting customers to reach into their pocket for more than one coin. Games did better on location if a user only need to insert one coin. The US mint had begun issuing dollar coins but the public would not use them and the government refused to stop printing dollar bills. All this left the vending industry in a pickle to come up with an economical way to accept dollar bills.

At Bally we experimented with a new coin door that could optionally have a dollar bill acceptor and some distributers came up with their own conversions. The Vector game photo looks like just that, a distributor or homemade conversion kit.

As for the red button, again, does not look factory more like a homemade conversion. Since the Bally start button was incorporated into the traditional coin door any replacement kit would have to include a new button and wiring mod. As to why the Vector game seems to have both I’m not sure. Remember, the start button wiring was in the coin door harness so placing the button on the cabinet would have made wring modifications more complex. It’s possible the conversion kit included a button for the cabinet and the installer started off thinking they would put the start button on the cabinet only to discover the wiring or Vectors multi ball ramps were in the way. It may have been easier to leave the button in place than to fill the hole.

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