Playable Vectrex game
About Cosmic Chasm
Fight room by room through an expanding space station, destroy its reactor, and escape in Bill Hawkins’s original Vectrex design Cosmic Chasm.
- Collection
- Games
- Classification
- Official library
- Catalog year
- 1982
- Programmed by
- William “Bill” Hawkins
- Designed by
- Jeff Corsiglia
- Publisher
- GCE / Milton Bradley
- Genre
- Maze, Multidirectional shooter, Strategy
- Players
- 1–2 players, alternating
- Research confidence
- verified
- ROM editions
- 1
- Browser controls
- Keyboard, joystick, or gamepad
Development and history
Cosmic Chasm was created for the Vectrex before Cinematronics adapted the idea into a color-vector arcade machine. The Vectrex Game Database credits Bill Hawkins, and developer recollections credit Jeff Corsiglia with the design. Sources differ on whether to label the home release 1982 or 1983.
Bill Hawkins later described completing Cosmic Chasm in roughly six weeks using an early S-100/CP/M development setup with floppy drives. Its home-to-arcade path is the reverse of the usual porting story and gives it a special place in vector-game history.
This page uses one stable canonical URL for the title and loads its embedded ROM directly into the emulator after the Vectrex BIOS is ready.
Gameplay and background
Use the map to choose a route through connected rooms, destroy protector ships, drill through force fields, and keep moving before each room’s central core expands too far. The mission ends with destroying the reactor and escaping the station before it collapses.
How to play in Vectrexia
- Move with the Arrow keys or WASD. Compatible controllers can use the left analog stick or D-pad.
- Vectrex buttons 1–4 map to Z, X, C, and V, and to the standard face buttons on most gamepads.
- Press a controller button after connecting it so the browser can expose the gamepad to the page.
Audio may begin after the first click, key press, or controller input because browsers can restrict autoplay.
Research sources
Available editions
Alternate dumps and revisions share this canonical page to avoid duplicate search pages. Choose a specific edition from the in-app Library.