steve sparks

Arcade · 1976 classic

Breakout

Knock down two walls of bricks with 3 balls. The ball speeds up as you break through, and your paddle shrinks to half once it reaches the back wall.

Score000
Best000
Balls3
Wall1
ReadyMove the paddle with the mouse, your finger or the arrow keys.
How to play
  • Move the paddle with the mouse, by dragging on the playfield, or with ← → (or A D). Press Space or tap to serve.
  • Where the ball lands on the paddle sets its angle: the middle sends it straight up, the ends send it wide.
  • Yellow bricks are worth 1 point, green 3, orange 5 and red 7. Clear the first wall and a second one appears. A perfect game scores 896.
  • The ball speeds up after 4 and 12 hits, and the first time it reaches the orange and the red rows. When it breaks through to the back wall, your paddle shrinks to half until you lose that ball.
  • P pauses; the game also pauses when you switch away. Your game saves between serves.
Stats
Games0
Best score0
Walls cleared0
Bricks broken0
History

Atari released Breakout in arcades in 1976.12 Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow came up with the idea of turning Pong into a one-player game against a wall of bricks.34 Steve Wozniak designed a prototype that used remarkably few chips, working with Steve Jobs, who had taken on the job at Atari.32 Accounts differ on the details, including how the two split the pay, and Atari found the design too hard to build and repair, and reworked it for production.32

The arcade screen was black and white. Strips of colored film over the monitor gave the bricks their bands of color, and the paddle its tint.5 Super Breakout followed in arcades in 1978,6 and Breakout came home on the Atari 2600 the same year.7

Sources

  1. 1Atari, Inc., Breakout (sales flyer) (Santa Clara, CA: Atari, Inc., 1976), https://archive.org/details/arcadeflyer_breakout (accessed October 26, 2026).
  2. 2Jon-Paul Dyson, “Steve Jobs, Breakout Pioneer,” The Strong blog, October 7, 2011, https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/steve-jobs-breakout-pioneer/ (accessed October 26, 2026).
  3. 3Tekla S. Perry, “Atari Breakout: The Best Video Game of All Time?” IEEE Spectrum, December 1, 1982, https://spectrum.ieee.org/atari-breakout (accessed October 26, 2026).
  4. 4Allison Marsh, “Pong Was Boring—And People Loved It,” IEEE Spectrum (Past Forward), October 30, 2022, https://spectrum.ieee.org/pong-video-game (accessed October 26, 2026).
  5. 5Atari, Inc., Breakout Operation, Maintenance and Service Manual (TM-058, 4th printing) (Atari, Inc., n.d.), https://archive.org/details/ArcadeGameManualBreakout (accessed October 26, 2026). Cited at §1.1; §3.2.3.
  6. 6Atari, Inc., Super Breakout (sales flyer) (Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, Inc., 1978), https://archive.org/details/arcadeflyer_super-breakout_alt (accessed October 26, 2026).
  7. 7Atari, Inc., Consumer Division, Breakout (Game Program instructions, model CX2622, Video Computer System) (Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, Inc., 1978), https://archive.org/details/Breakout1978Atari_201701 (accessed October 26, 2026).
About this version

I first wrote a brick game as part of a set of casual games. This version is rewritten to follow the 1976 rules: eight rows in four color bands, the speed-ups, the shrinking paddle and the two walls. It also fixes a bug in my original, where the ball moved a set distance per screen refresh and so ran twice as fast on a 120 Hz display. Now the game runs on a fixed clock, whatever the screen.

A free, non-commercial tribute to Atari's 1976 arcade game; not affiliated with or endorsed by Atari. All artwork here is original.