50 Years of Video Games: Breakout (Arcade)

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the simple joys of a block breaker game. It visualizes the player’s progress well and provides a little reflex challenge with the satisfaction of possibly hitting the ball just right to take out multiple blocks at once. However, my introduction to the genre was more with games like Arkanoid and Alleyway rather than the originator of the format. In 1976 Atari released Breakout, the concept coming from company founder Nolan Bushnell’s desire to make a single player version of the incredibly popular game Pong. While it seems Clean Sweep had two years on Breakout and thus was the true grandfather of the block breaker genre, Breakout is where it caught on with the public, although now its name also routinely comes up as part of the anecdote involving Apple’s found Steve Jobs taking advantage of his friend and fellow founder aSteve Wozniak. Steve Jobs agreed to Atari’s request to reduce the arcade machine’s use of TTL chips with an additional payment for each one removed from the design, but Jobs lied about the payout to Wozniak after Wozniak did most of the work. This tiny story of a smart man being exploited by his friend seems to have not amounted to much either as Atari supposedly couldn’t manufacture the version he produced and used their own instead.

However, this bit of personal history of some famous tech figures is all tied to a simple game about hitting a ball with a paddle to break down a wall of bricks. While the arcade marquee and other little bits of branding present it as a game about a prisoner escaping jail, there certainly isn’t anything that exciting going on in the game itself, the player instead twisting a knob to move a paddle locked at the bottom of the screen left or right. The player has three balls per credit, losing any balls that manage to slip past the paddle, and quite similarly to Pong part of the challenge is that your paddle is actually a fairly small object on screen. Unlike in Pong though it’s not multiplayer so here a tiny paddle size can often prove to be a bit more frustrating, especially since the speed of the ball will increase at certain points during play to up the difficulty. Technically Breakout does have multiplayer, but it involves alternating play whenever a player loses their ball, essentially just a competition to see who can score more.

The focus of Breakout is on a set of bricks arranged in a neat rectangle close to the top of the screen. Positioned just below the score counters, this line of bricks looks nice and colorful but its appearance is actually a trick involving cellophane placed over the screen. The actual game rendering is in black and white, but the colors are important since the bricks provide a different amount of points based on their color and the ball will speed up when it makes first contact with an orange or red brick. There are 112 bricks total to clear on the screen arranged in eight rows that consist of 14 columns. The top two rows are red, followed by two rows of orange, two of green, and two of yellow, with bricks closest to the top worth more since the player must first break through the lower reaches to get to them. The ball can ricochet off the paddle, the edges of the screen, and any bricks it makes contact with in a way that seems to make sense but can still be hard to keep up with once the ball has picked up some speed. If you do manage to clear the screen of all its bricks, you’ll be moved onto a second identical screen with the same brick arrangement to do so again, but if you can clear this one as well the game will not produce any more bricks and you have no choice but to let your remaining balls go to waste.

While having two identical levels and then forcing an end isn’t a great way to keep players invested in playing, especially since it puts a hard cap on the amount of points any player could potentially earn, the game’s difficulty makes it unlikely players will reach that point. One odd thing about Breakout compared to the games that follow it is how the bricks don’t really seem to have any collision on their sides. If the ball makes contact with a wall of bricks from the side it seems to prefer instead removing a single block whose corner it could have said to have been touching. This unfortunately means Breakout doesn’t have one of the most satisfying parts of the genre where the ball hits the bricks just right to ricochet between them and knock a few out in a row. If you can clear out an entire column and get your ball above the brick wall though you can at least bounce it against the tops of the blocks, but the moment your ball hits the ceiling your already tiny paddle will be cut in half and the game will become much harder to keep up with.

The fact you will almost always only hit one brick with your ball really robs Breakout of some of its potential energy. Your reflexes are still being tested, but it feels a lot more like you’re just keeping the ball in play rather than trying to angle a ricochet to achieve anything. Even if you do get behind the wall and hit a few back there, that moment is tainted by losing part of your paddle and likely meeting your end fairly soon after as you try to keep up with a max speed ball. Things start off tepid and repetitive and shift to difficult and still repetitive, but while you have some influence on how the ball bounces back into play, it’s not really worth too much effort to try and adjust its flight path save for when you’re down to the last few bricks. Breakout leans pretty hard on the pure challenge of your reflexes, and while removing blocks one at a time does visualize your progress, that progress is too slow-going. There’s still some mild satisfaction of cleaning up the screen, but it lacks the complications that could spice things up or any sort of reward for trying to do more than being the surface that keeps the ball in play.

THE VERDICT: Breakout has a formula for a satisfying game of visualized progress but it doesn’t have all the necessary elements to realize it. The brick wall wants to only lose one brick at a time and the rare chances to get rid of more come with the price of a difficulty increase, so even the burst of satisfaction from finally seeing that ricochet do more damage is dampened. Even though the ball gets faster and thus harder to hit, the challenge doesn’t become more exciting since it still feels like the damage you’re doing is far too gradual. If you can get into a rhythm it won’t be awful, but destroying over 100 bricks one at a time is unfortunately as tedious as it sounds.

And so, I give Breakout for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Perhaps having 112 blocks that have collision on all sides was a technological feat too hard to realize at the time, but while the benefit of hindsight allows us to see how much more satisfying the game could be if ricochets could produce more destruction, it doesn’t remove the fact that breaking bricks in Breakout’s current form isn’t too thrilling. The slow removal means the player’s active role in keeping the ball in play actually feels a little passive since there isn’t much reason to be more than a surface to ricochet off of, but the speed increases at least prevents the game from ever feeling too sleepy. Two identical screens and an immediate cutoff with no room to expand your high score once hitting it really does reduce any urge to want to stick with Breakout once you have half a paddle and a ball going wild across the screen though. Later ports and versions of Breakout would start to add some of the simple ideas that make even this simple version of the gameplay more exciting, collision with the sides of blocks a big improvement but even having more than two screens, variation between those screens, and even alternate game modes such as one where the ball passes through bricks instead of bouncing off them giving the game more to do than its original arcade release.

Breakout took off because it was released as a time with simple standards and the genre it introduced was novel, but it’s certainly the kind of game that became antiquated once others realized the holes in its initial design. Breakout’s appeal is clearing out those bricks gradually, but even though newer versions keep the reflex challenge involved, simply hitting the ball back knowing only one brick will be erased can be disheartening. There’s not much of a need to try and do anything but keep the ball in play until eventually it does the work on its own. Super Breakout two years later starts to introduce some of the ideas that give this niche genre some of its thrills, but the first Breakout game is far too basic of an execution of its concept that it’s hard to get invested in its play for too long whether or not you believe this is some inmate trying to bust his way out of prison.