![]() ![]() Al Alcorn was assigned as the Breakout project manager, and he began development with Cyan Engineering in 1975. Bushnell was certain the game would be popular, and he and Bristow partnered to produce a concept. Bushnell wanted to turn Pong into a single player game, where the player would use a paddle to maintain a ball that depletes a wall of bricks. Atari produced innovative video games using the Pong hardware as a means of competition against companies making " Pong clones". īreakout, a discrete logic (non- microprocessor) game, was designed by Nolan Bushnell, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Bristow, all three of whom were involved with Atari and its Kee Games subsidiary. Clean Sweep was one of the top ten best-selling arcade video games of 1974 and sold a total of 3,500 arcade cabinets. In that game, the player uses a paddle to hit a ball up towards a playfield of dots, which disappear as the ball moves through the dots the goal is to achieve a clean sweep by erasing all the dots. If the player successfully destroys the wall in-game, their inmate escapes with others following.Ī precursor to Breakout was Clean Sweep, released by Ramtek in 1974. According to this release, the player is actually playing as one of a prison's inmates attempting to knock a ball and chain into a wall of their prison cell with a mallet. The original arcade cabinet of Breakout featured artwork that revealed the game's plot to be that of a prison escape. Once the third screen is eliminated, the game is over. If "Player One" completes the first screen on their third and last ball, then immediately and deliberately allows the ball to "drain", Player One's second screen is transferred to "Player Two" as a third screen, allowing Player Two to score a maximum of 1,344 points if they are adept enough to keep the third ball in play that long. However, a secret way to score beyond the 896 maximum is to play the game in two-player mode. Once the second screen of bricks is destroyed, the ball in play harmlessly bounces off empty walls until the player restarts the game, as no additional screens are provided. The highest score achievable for one player is 896 this is done by eliminating two screens of bricks worth 448 points per screen. Ball speed increases at specific intervals: after four hits, after twelve hits, and after making contact with the orange and red rows. The paddle shrinks to one-half its size after the ball has broken through the red row and hit the upper wall. Yellow bricks earn one point each, green bricks earn three points, orange bricks earn five points and the top-level red bricks score seven points each. The player has three turns to try to clear two screens of bricks. If the player's paddle misses the ball's rebound, they will lose a turn. ![]() Using a single ball, the player must knock down as many bricks as possible by using the walls and/or the paddle below to hit the ball against the bricks and eliminate them. The color order from the bottom up is yellow, green, orange and red. In Japan, the genre is known as block kuzushi ("block breaker") games.īreakout begins with eight rows of bricks, with each two rows a different kinds of color. In 1986 the Breakout concept found new legs with Taito's Arkanoid, which itself spawned dozens of imitators. Super Breakout introduced multiple balls in play at once, which became a common feature in the genre. An official sequel was released in 1978, Super Breakout, which eventually became the pack-in game for the Atari 5200 console in 1982. ![]() It was the inspiration for aspects of the Apple II computer and Taito's Space Invaders (1978). While the concept was predated by Ramtek's Clean Sweep (1974), Breakout spawned an entire genre of clones. The 1978 Atari VCS port uses color graphics instead of a monochrome screen with colored overlay. Breakout was a worldwide commercial success, among the top five highest-grossing arcade video games of 1976 in both the United States and Japan and then among the top three highest-grossing arcade video games of 1977 in the US and Japan. The arcade game was released in Japan by Namco. In Breakout, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen and the goal is to destroy them all by repeatedly bouncing a ball off a paddle into them. It was designed by Steve Wozniak, based on conceptualization from Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow who were influenced by the seminal 1972 Atari arcade game Pong. Breakout is an arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. ![]()
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