Breakout
1976 · Action · Arcade
Overview
Breakout is a 1976 Atari arcade game in which a player uses a paddle to bounce a ball against a wall of bricks, trying to clear every brick without letting the ball fall off the bottom of the screen. It evolved from Pong's paddle mechanics into a single-player challenge with escalating difficulty, and was a massive commercial and cultural hit. The hardware design was famously completed by Steve Wozniak in four days on a challenge from Nolan Bushnell, using an unusually efficient circuit that industry engineers struggled to reverse-engineer. The concept inspired countless clones and remains one of the most imitated game mechanics ever created.
Deep Dive
Breakout was conceived by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow as a single-player variant of Pong. Atari hired Steve Wozniak — still years before co-founding Apple Computer — to design the hardware, and he famously completed the task in four days with only 44 chips, far fewer than the engineers had thought possible. The game featured eight rows of bricks in four colors with different point values. As the ball cleared the top rows and entered the space above, it bounced rapidly at increasing speed, making the endgame extremely challenging. The Atari 2600 home version in 1978 became one of the system's best-sellers and introduced the game to home audiences worldwide. The 1986 sequel Super Breakout added multiple balls and other innovations, and the franchise's influence is still felt in modern puzzle games.
Developer Story
Breakout was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow at Atari in 1975, with the hardware built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs was paid a flat fee and secretly pocketed most of a bonus Atari paid for minimising the chip count — he gave Wozniak only $350 of the $5,000 bonus. Wozniak's elegant design used just 44 chips. The game directly inspired Wozniak to create the Apple II, which featured a built-in version of Breakout.
Did You Know?
- Steve Jobs hired Steve Wozniak to design the hardware for a flat fee, then kept the majority of Atari's chip-reduction bonus for himself — Wozniak didn't learn this for years.
- Wozniak designed the hardware in just four nights using only 44 chips — far fewer than Atari's engineers thought possible.
- Wozniak later said that working on Breakout directly led to the design of the Apple II, particularly its colour graphics hardware.
- The game was a one-player adaptation of Pong — Bushnell's idea was to let solo players enjoy the Pong mechanic without needing an opponent.
- Breakout spawned an entire genre: Arkanoid, Alleyway, and thousands of modern "brick breaker" mobile games are all its descendants.
