My past self: ''Y'know, I think it's time I give Breakout a shot! It'll take me what, 10, 20 minutes to get something out of it? I'm sure I'll be done in a while...

My present self (2 hours later): ''Y'know, I used to be fucking stupid when I was younger!''

And you mean to tell me that founding Apple is Steve Wozniak's highest achievement? But... this shit is better than the MacBook!

Despite so many years of playing Breakout in different versions and in scattered moments, it never truly hit me till now how much fun of a game it actually is. You could have fun by yourself in Pong, it’s just like bashing your head against a wall: even if you end up enjoying, it’s not gonna last very long before something caves in.

Breakout answers to that idea by making that wall fun to bash against! It’s a back and forth against yourself that feels rewarding beyond the mere act of seeing the number score getting higher; dismantling that multicolored wall piece by piece is as simple as it is addicting, which it’s a lot.

Even tho Breakout’s pitch is pretty much ‘’Pong but singleplayer focused’’, I also like to think of it a sort of reinterpretation of pinball machines into videogame territory. A really simplistic one to be sure, but that lifts of elements from it that fit —like the strike system, with a certain number of balls given to you per coin to get a high score—, but also shifts away from the ‘’choose your own path/route’’ that the best machines make you feel and instead puts your objective in front of you. Am I overthinking things? Most likely! But it’s hard to not let your mind ponder over the little things as you break away and have a fun little time.

It’s one of those games that just works… except when it doesn’t. The rather clunky hit detection that was already present in Pong hasn’t gonna go anywhere, I would like to say that it’s just a matter that the paddle’s hitbox as the paddle itself, but it seems to depend more from where the ball is coming, sometimes making contact is enough, others you need to line up perfectly, and it can feel a little discouraging when it messes you up when you are having a good run. It does fix the speed of the ball on spawn tho, it makes it pretty much impossible to miss in your first throw and eases thing into getting as fast as hell, so ya win some ya keep some, I guess…

Breakout is still very much a win, and it doesn’t need dragons on the cover art to show that, it’s another piece of the massive domino that was the arcade industry of the 70’s, piece that would lead to amazing games like Space Invaders, but also a great piece on its own.

I've been trying to play more of the older videogames, not SNES old, but Atari 2600/colecovision old. In particular I've found what I've always suspected from what little experience I previously had : these games are so charming and timeless.

In particular Breakout is so simple but so good to play some 37 years later, stimulating that simple part of the brain that gets joy from bouncing a ball against the wall. In truth I have already played Breakout many times before actually playing the OG in the form of Arkanoid and other "Block Breakers".

The story of Breakout's development is as interesting as the game itself. I'll admit however that in researching this myself I have seen several inconsistencies in the stories being told, a common thing in these kinds of oral histories and especially ones which involve interpersonal conflict and deception. I could have gone and read the Steve Jobs biography and other stuff but look, I aint no Detchibe/Cadensia etc who actually put effort into their reviews, so take everything here with a pinch of salt.

The idea for breakout came from pong designers Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, who saw the potential to turn a 2 player game dependent on a skilled opponent to make the game interesting into a 1 player vertical pong where the at the time common high score mechanic would incentivize further play to max it out [1]. Bushnell was frustrated with newer Atari Games needing 150-170 chips, which were expensive and hired Steve Wozniak, mutual acquaintance of then Atari employee Steve Jobs; who had made a version of Pong requiring only 30 chips, promising a 700 dollar bonus if it was under 50 chips and 1000 if under 40 chips (according to usinflationcalculator.com this would be approx 3700 and 5300 dollars today respectively). [2]

Wozniak pulled a few all nighters to finish the game in between working his day job at Hewlett and Packard but was only able to get the number of chips down to 44 so "only" got his half of the 700 dollar bonus[2]. Unbeknownst to him, Jobs had actually been promised 5000 dollars and so pocketed quite the profit despite Wozniak having been the one to do most of the work[3]. Wozniak himself said he was hurt by the revelation years later of the deception even though [he] "don't hurt easily" but seemed to have gotten over it and let bygones be bygones by the time of the blogpost circa 2000. Whether or not this was genuine or a desire to not stir anything up knowing how the internet works is hard to tell, but personally Wozniak doesn't seem the type to hold a grudge.

I leave up to the reader to take what they will from the story, beyond the obvious that the practices of the game industry have seemingly been cutthroat from day one and that Steve Jobs was perhaps not the nicest person (well, that and a million other things he did but thats beyond the scope of this review).

Personally I would encourage everyone to try these Atari games out. There's a lot to learn from their simpler, more technologically constrained arcade designs. I have elsewhere been called insane for this but I genuinely believe these Atari Games have aged a lot better than a lot of early 3D games. Seriously if you don't believe me grab a random young person, get them to try asteroids and then the original tomb raider. Obviously this isnt bulletproof and a fully "fair" pair up of games from these two disparate consoles is impossible but I think my point still stands.

EDIT: I did not catch on to the fact that Detchibe actually already wrote a piece on this game, using pretty much exactly the same sources I did, which makes it look like I just ripped it off. I now want to jump off a steep cliff.

Citations
1. Lambie, R. (2011, May 12). The story of breakout. Den of Geek. Retrieved March 21, 2023, from https://www.denofgeek.com/games/the-story-of-breakout/
2. Williams, G., & Moore, R. (1984). The Apple Story Part 1: The Early History An Interview With Steve Wozniak. Byte - The Small Systems Journal, 9(13), 462–466. /https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/page/n461/mode/2up?view=theater
3. Wozniak, S. (2000, August 15). Letters-General Questions Answered. Woz.org. Retrieved March 21, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20110612071502/http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html

(played as part of ATARI 50)

A real stroke of genius from the Apple Steves - they figured out one-player PONG! That was the idea, and that's what it is. Conceptually, it's a simple, but pretty brilliant solution to that little conundrum, nonetheless.

As a game, it could be tuned better to be more fun. The paddle should probably be a little bit wider and the speed of the ball shouldn't get so severe so fast - the difficulty curve is too steep to really get into it. But this is said without much understanding of the limitations of designing these early games, and more importantly, not knowing whether being "more fun" was really the goal (as opposed to "eat quarters"). Also, as with PONG, I'm sure this is a much different experience on real hardware with the real dial controller. Incidentally, the PS5 touch pad controls for this are actually really good and easily the best way to play it.

Fun fact: all these years of knowing Breakout and I never made the connection that it was about breaking out of jail. Duh!

Played as part of Atari 50. 2600 version.

Thought this was worse than the arcade version due to the control scheme, but I stand corrected, the 2600 did have a paddle controller. Even though it wasn't used for much, it was used here, so my opinion on it is basically the same as the arcade version. No ricochet still sucks and you gotta play a few levels of the new Neo Breakout first to unlock this version and, wow it is night and day seeing what would normally be a middle-of-the-road modern brick breaker right next to this.

A technical marvel of computer wizardry by Steve Wozniak. However, as I have seen it reiterated time and again, most recently in the (so far) excellent ATARI 50, I wish to stress that Steve Jobs had minimal (read: no) involvement with the development or design of Breakout.

I think it's an interesting enough tale that you should dive into it yourself, but here's the basic rundown:

Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard, and got a call from Jobs about the work he was doing at Atari. Jobs' job was to give Atari's games a final test for any tweaks necessary. Bushnell assigned Jobs the task of making a single-player Pong-like where the player would break bricks. Jobs was to receive a ~$750 bonus for every chip under fifty since Bushnell disliked how many chips Atari's games were using. Bushnell offered the job to Jobs because he had heard Jobs' friend Wozniak had made a Pong-clone using only 30 chips. Jobs only told Wozniak that there would be a $700 bonus for getting things under 50 chips, and $1,000 if they were under 40. Jobs told Wozniak they would split that $700/$1,000 fee. To meet the four day deadline, Wozniak worked four nights straight at Atari while performing his main job at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs would breadboard Wozniak's designs and wire the chips. Jobs and Wozniak ended up with mononucleosis. With a finalised design at fourty-four chips, Jobs paid Wozniak half the $700 he told Wozniak they would earn. The actual bonus earned was $5,000, and Wozniak wouldn't find out the truth until years later. In his own words:

"[...]we were kids, you know. He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn't honest with me, and I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything. Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don't really understand why he would've gotten paid one thing and told me he'd gotten paid another. [...] I never let stuff like what happened with Breakout bother me. Though you can disagree -- you can even split from a relationship -- you don't have to hold it against the other. You're just different. That's the best way to live life and be happy."

For further reading, I suggest Steve Wozniak's biography iWoz, this interview from the December 1984 edition of BYTE magazine, and this Q&A from Wozniak's website.

Gotta admit, there's certainly something humbling about being able to play and easily complete plenty of games on modern consoles with incredibly deep and complex systems and mechanics layered over painstakingly crafted visuals yet get absolutely smacked the fuck down from a 1976 arcade game made out of a bunch of squares and rectangles. This shit is merciless and demands an incredible amount of focus, precision, and pattern recognition if you want to even come close to clearing the board, even with precise analogue controls. You are only granted 3-5 misses to clear 112 blocks where hitting the back 3 rows automatically boosts the ball to fuck-you levels of speed, and somehow surviving long enough to hit the top of the screen shrinks your paddle to nearly the size of the ball. Good luck. It's still certainly addicting to get in a good block-breaking rhythm if you can take the heat, and its really not like theres any real reward or ending for clearing the screen (except for the next screen loading in, which if you manage to end the game on an upwards rebound essentially gives you a free second clear thanks to the ball getting trapped in the top). I def get why this became such a popular title, though i also think i understand why space invaders ended up usurping the block breaker genre (let me shoot these stupid blocks dammit)

I’ve already mentioned bartop breakout clones were a secondary baby sitter of mine during my youth, and I will probably keep mentioning it because I don't have a shrink, so its nice to see the console originator of the concept here and still holding up well.

Although I guess saying it holds up is overselling it since its such a basic concept that is executed well enough here in the port despite some limitations, but the core gameplay works so it doesn’t matter too much.

Any port limitations make sense when you realize that not only did the guy who programmed this, Brad Stewart, win the job after beating coworker Ian Shepard in a game of the original arcade Breakout, but that Stewart didn’t have access to any of the arcade games original designers because giving credit to the people who actually made the fucking game was not an accepted practice yet. I’m sure he wouldn’t have found much help from the arcade dev team though, full of a bunch of nobodies like Nolan Bushnell, Steve Bristow, and some guy named Wozniak or something.

Fun fact; did you know that Steve Jobs was involved in the early prototyping and development of the arcade version and apparently acted like a giant fucking dickhead who pocketed more money than anyone else even though he delegated the lion’s share of the work to Wozniak? Go figure!

~ Juegos que Hay que Jugar Antes de Morir ~
Parte 1 — Los 70: Los Orígenes

Juego 3: Breakout (1976)

Como el Pong, uno de esos juegos eternos. Típico juego para matar las horas en clase de informática, aunque su hermano mayor Arkanoid le adelanta por la derecha.

Played as part of Atari 50. Arcade version.

Doesn't have ricochet so it's kinda busted. Has novelty value but don't expect to be able to clear it (even with mouse controls) due to that tiny paddle. Definitely worse purely by nature of other, better versions of this idea existing not very long after this one, but for the time it makes sense that it doesn't really have any real sort of collision system allowing for a ball to hit more than one brick each bounce. But playing this nowadays is like going back to old versions of Tetris and realizing they don't have hard drop, lol