Bill Paul and Zonn's page (over here) has a much better history of Cinematronics as a company than I can provide, so I'll let him do the talking there. From a player's perspective, Cinematronics games were different because they were vector (line drawings) games, instead of the usual raster (filled objects) games. They looked, sounded and played unlike almost anything else out there at the time. Furthermore, many of them were two-player simultaneous games -- some where you competed against your opponent, some where cooperation was needed in order to survive.
While most of the games were monochrome, colored overlays over the screen provided some color. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, many of these games can be represented under CinEmu with their correct colors.
The screenshots are plain ol' PrintScreen dumps, so don't be fooled by lack of color or fuzziness; this emulator looks good and the games ROCK.
Select a game below to see a quick summary:
For a (slightly outdated) history of Cinematronics games, click here.