Breakout
Breakout is closely linked to the founding history of Apple: the game was developed in 1976 by Steve Wozniak and Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell created the game design, while Steve Jobs persuaded his friend Steve Wozniak to design the game. Jobs got $5,000 from Bushnell for the development, of which Wozniak only got $350 from Jobs, even though he designed the entire game. It was first released by Atari as a slot machine, before it was later ported to various home computers such as the Apple II.
The game principle could be described as a kind of solo pong: With a racket the task is to hold a ball in the playing field and hit a row of bricks on the upper playing field. If the ball is lost, one attempt is deducted and after a few failed attempts it is called Game Over. A level is finished when all the bricks are cleared.
Breakout was very often reissued in the 80s and 90s in the commercial and freeware area. The most famous version was made by Taito and was called Arkanoid. This version brought a lot of new gameplay elements. There were bricks that had to be hit several times until they were removed and various bonus and malus capsules that gave the player advantages (extra life, multiball, wider clubs, …) or disadvantages (shortening of the club, loss of a life, …). But especially in the Free- and Shareware area on the Amiga, the C64 and the later DOS computers the game principle was taken up countless times.
Arkanoid
In 1986 an independent “Breakout” clone from Taito appeared with Arkanoid. But the offshoot, developed ten years later, grew beyond itself and thus gained its own fan base and a place in the eternal list of popular classics. The success of the game was based on the many new features it brought. Developer Akira Fujita paid attention to more variety in the game, so enemy ships and laser cannons do not make the player’s life any easier. Power-ups, on the other hand, can help over the tricky time into the 32 levels. After Arkanoid had successfully established itself on the market, countless imitation games shot up from the ground, the genre of which was henceforth called “Breakout”, a game principle in which a ball bounces off a platform to shoot down different stones.
Game Principle
In contrast to the original of the eighties, on the arcade slot machines or the Commodore 64, the newly released Flash version is controlled with the mouse. The goal of each level is to eliminate all colored blocks with the help of the flying ball. Some of them need several collisions before they finally break. In addition, bonus objects keep falling out of the smashed blocks, which you can pick up if you want. Some of these bonuses lengthen your paddle, increasing the chances of hitting them. Others make the exact opposite happen or let the ball stick to the paddle each time, which you can then shoot off in the desired direction with a mouse click. Other helpful objects bring an extra life or make the ball fly slower. If all blocks are destroyed, you reach the next level.
Countless variations
Today there are countless variants and offshoots of Breakout. You can find millions of free games on the Internet under Smasher Games or Arkanoid Games, which you can play directly in your browser. Unfortunately the flash games do not work on smartphones, but there are also countless apps for IOs and Android available.