Breakout is an arcade game developed by Atari and introduced in 1976. It was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, and influenced by the 1972 arcade game PONG. The game was ported to video game consoles and upgraded to video games such as Super Breakout. In addition, Breakout was the basis and inspiration for books, video games, and the Apple II personal computer. A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. ... This article is about a corporate game company. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... This article is about a corporate game company. ... A game designer is a person who designs games. ... Nolan K. Bushnell 9000 (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari and the Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza-Time Theaters chain. ... Stephan Gary Woz Wozniak (born August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California) is an American computer engineer turned philanthropist. ... 1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ... Video games are generally categorized into genres. ... Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ... Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ... The Atari 2600, released in October 1977, was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ... This arcade cabinet, containing Centipede, is an upright. ... A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor when the meaning is clear from the context, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record. ... Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ... Breakout is a classic Pong-like arcade game Breakout is a slang for a prison escape Breakout (movie) is also movie starring Charles Bronson and Robert Duvall [1] Breakout (military) is a military operation to end a situation of encirclement or siege Breakout is a song from Never Say Die... Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ... This article is about a corporate game company. ... See also: 1975 in video gaming, other events of 1976, 1977 in video gaming, history of video games Events Exidy releases the controversial Death Race arcade game. ... Nolan K. Bushnell 9000 (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari and the Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza-Time Theaters chain. ... See also: 1971 in video gaming, other events of 1972, 1973 in video gaming, history of video games Events May 24: Magnavox unveils the Odyssey at a Burlingame, California convention. ... PONG helped bring computerized video games into everyday life. ... Four different video game consoles from different generations. ... The Apple II was one of the most popular personal computers of the 1980s. ...

In the game, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls of the screen. When the ball hits a brick, the ball bounces off and the brick disappears. The player loses a turn when the ball touches the bottom of the screen, and to prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle to bounce the ball back into play.

The arcade cabinet uses a black and white monitor. However, the monitor has strips of colored cellophane placed over it so that the bricks appear to be in color. This arcade cabinet, containing Centipede, is an upright. ... A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor when the meaning is clear from the context, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record. ...

History and development

Breakout, a discrete logic (non-microprocessor) game, was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, after the latter had "rejoined" Atari after the merge of Atari subsidiary Kee Games. A logic gate is an arrangement of electronically-controlled switches used to calculate operations in Boolean algebra. ... A microprocessor is a programmable digital electronic component that incorporates the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single semiconducting integrated circuit (IC). ... Nolan K. Bushnell 9000 (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari and the Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza-Time Theaters chain. ... Kee Games was an arcade game manufacturer that released games from 1973 to 1978. ...

They had an idea to turn PONG into a single player game, where the player would use a ball to deplete a wall of bricks without missing the ball on its rebound. Bushnell was certain the game would be popular, and the two partnered to produce a concept. Al Alcorn was assigned as the project manager, and began development with Cyan Engineering in 1975. The same year, Alcorn assigned Steve Jobs to design a prototype. Jobs was offered $750 USD, with an extra $100 each time a chip was eliminated from the prospected design. Jobs promised to complete a prototype within four days. PONG helped bring computerized video games into everyday life. ... Al Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, went to Berkeley, and later was at the video pioneering company, Ampex. ... Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. ...

Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak—employee of Hewlett-Packard—was capable of producing designs with a small amount of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description. To save parts, he had "tricky little designs" difficult to understand for most engineers. Near the end of development, Wozniak considered moving the high score to the screen's top, but Jobs claimed Bushnell wanted it at the bottom; Wozniak unaware of any truth to his claims. The original deadline was met, and 50 chips were removed from Jobs' original design. This equated to a $5000 USD bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375. The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... High score of the Commodore 64 game Great Giana Sisters. ...

Atari were unable to use Steve Wozniak's design. By designing the board with as few chips as possible, he also cut down the amount of TTL (transistor-transistor logic) chips to 42. This made the design difficult to manufacture — it was too compact and complicated to be feasible with Atari's manufacturing methods. However, Wozniak claims Atari could not understand the design, and speculates "maybe some engineer there was trying to make some kind of modification to it". Atari ended up designing their own version for production, which contained about 100 TTL chips. Wozniak found the gameplay to be the same as his original creation, and couldn't find any differences.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]} A Motorola 68000-based computer with various TTL chips. ...

Gameplay

Breakout begins with eight rows of bricks, with each two rows a different color. The color order from the bottom up is yellow, green, orange and red. Using a single ball, the player must knock down as many bricks as possible by using the walls and/or the paddle below to ricochet the ball against the bricks and eliminate them. 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. To add to the challenge, the paddle shrinks to one-half its size after the ball has broken through the red row and hit the upper wall. In addition, ball speed increases at specific intervals: after four hits, after twelve hits, and after making contact with the orange and red rows.

The maximum score that one player can achieve is 896, by eliminating two screens of bricks of 448 points each. Once the second screen of bricks is destroyed, the ball in play harmlessly bounces off empty walls until the player finally relinquishes the game, as no additional screens are provided. However, a secret way to score beyond the 896 maximum is to play the game in two-player mode. If Player One completes the first screen on his or her 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 1344 points if he or she is adept enough to keep the third ball in play that long. Once the third screen is eliminated, the game is over.

Influences

Apple II

Breakout directly influenced Steve Wozniak's design for the Apple II computer — "A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now."^[7] This included his design of color graphics circuitry and the now infamous beep and click sound circuitry. It also directly influenced his design of Integer BASIC (which he referred to as "Game Basic"), with his Integer BASIC version of Breakout being the first "proof of concept" application running on the prototype Apple II. His desire to play Breakout on his new computer also led to the addition of a paddle interface, and ultimately the bundling of paddle controllers and a cassette tape containing the code for Breakout for the Apple II's commercial release. The Apple II was one of the most popular personal computers of the 1980s. ... The Apple II was one of the most popular personal computers of the 1980s. ... Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, and as such was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners. ...

Pilgrim in the Microworld

Pilgrim in the Microworld is an autobiography by David Sudnow detailing his obsession with Breakout. Sudnow describes studying the game's mechanics, visiting the manufacturer in Silicon Valley, interviewing the programmers, and reading many books dedicated to Breakout.^[8] Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklins autobiography. ... A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley. ...

Other games

• Arcade remakes include Atari's own Super Breakout and Taito's Arkanoid as well as Namco's Quester.
• Handheld devices have had variants included with them as well. The most notable are those designed for rotary control, such as the iPod and the BlackBerry's Brick Breaker. The iRiver got Brickmania on the RockBox OS. An earlier handheld variant was Nintendo's Alleyway, released in 1989 for the original Game Boy system.
• Microvision The earliest handheld device with swapable cartridges, ca 1979, shipped with Block Buster, a simplistic Breakout clone.
• An updated version called Bebop was made in the 90s.
• Later versions of Turbo Pascal included Breakout, with source code, as an example of the Object Pascal language.
• Currently Sega's newest mini-game on SONIC the Hedgehog (2006) is based on Breakout.
• A version of Breakout exists in the Williams pinball machine Star Trek: The Next Generation as an Easter Egg. Because of fear of litigation the code to enter to play or even the existence of the easter egg was denied by the games' designer Steve Richie and the company.

The Taito Corporation (タイトー株式会社, taitou kabushikigaisha) TYO: 9646 is a Japanese developer of video game software and arcade hardware. ... Arkanoid is an arcade game developed by Taito in 1986. ... Namco Ltd ) is a amusement company based in Japan, best known overseas for video games development. ... Quester is an arcade game that was released by Namco in 1987. ... iPod (fifth generation) in Apple Universal Dock, iPod nano (second generation) and iPod shuffle (second generation) iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple and launched in 2001. ... The BlackBerry is a wireless handheld device introduced in 1999 which supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services. ... Current iriver logo iriver (formerly iRiver) Co. ... Rockbox is a free software replacement firmware for digital audio players (DAPs). ... Microvision The Microvision was a hand-held game console released by Milton Bradley Company in 1979. ... Turbo Pascal 3. ... Object Pascal is an object oriented derivative of Pascal mostly known as the primary programming language of Borland Delphi. ... Fabergé egg Easter eggs are specially decorated eggs given out to celebrate the Easter holiday or springtime. ...

Legacy

Ports

Atari 2600 home version of Breakout.

The original arcade version of Breakout has been officially ported to several systems, such as Atari Video Pinball, the Atari 5200 (included in Super Breakout) and the Atari 2600. Image File history File links Breakout2600. ... Image File history File links Breakout2600. ... In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed (e. ... The Atari 5200 SuperSystem, or simply Atari 5200, is a video game console that was introduced in 1982 by Atari as a replacement for the famous Atari 2600. ... The Atari 2600, released in October 1977, was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...

The Atari 2600 port was programmed by Brad Stewart. Stewart had been working on a backup project for the Atari 2600, which was eventually canceled. Consequently, Stewart and Ian Shepherd were both available to program Breakout for the Atari 2600. They decided to compete in the original version of Breakout to win programming rights, which Stewart won. In development, Stewart didn't receive help from the original designers (and was unaware who they were), and felt there were few obstacles to overcome. Difficulties arose with the Television Interface Adapter, but after Joe Decuir discussed his own ideas, "the light dawned and the rest of the implementation was (relatively) straightforward."^[9] The game was published in 1978. The Atari 2600, released in October 1977, was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ... The Television Interface Adapter (TIA) is the custom chip that is the heart of the Atari 2600 games console and was created by Jay Miner of Amiga fame. ...

Super Breakout

The success of the game resulted in the development of Super Breakout a couple of years later. While ostensibly very similar to Breakout – the layout, sound, and general behaviour of the game is identical – Super Breakout is a microprocessor based game instead of discrete logic, programmed using an early M6502 chip. Super Breakout is thus able to be emulated in MAME and is also featured in a number of different Atari compilation packs. The original Breakout has not been featured, since there is no processor in Breakout — the game would have been more "simulated" than emulated. A microprocessor is a programmable digital electronic component that incorporates the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single semiconducting integrated circuit (IC). ... The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology in 1975. ... MAME is an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software, with the intent of preserving gaming history and preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten. ...

In Super Breakout, there are three different and more advanced game types from which the player can choose:

• Double gives the player control of two bats at the same time—one placed above the other—and two balls. Losing a life occurs only when both balls go out of play, and points are doubled while the player is able to juggle both balls without losing either.
• Cavity retains the single bat and ball of Breakout, but two other balls are enclosed on the other side of the wall, which the player must free before they, too, can be used to destroy additional bricks. Points are increased for this, but triple points are available if the player can keep all three balls in play.
• Progressive also has the single bat and ball, but as the ball hits the paddle, the entire wall gradually advances downwards step by step, gaining in speed the longer the ball lasts in play. This is by far the most interesting of the three variants, and adds a whole new level of skill and urgency in breaking through the lower bricks to reach the higher-scoring ones above before the wall overwhelms the player.

Breakout 2000

There was also a reinvented Breakout 2000 game for the failed Atari Jaguar game console. Breakout 2000 was a 3-D version of the arcade classic. Designed for one or two players. The object of the game remained the same but in a 3D playfield. There were a total of ten different Phases to survive, each consisting of five playfields. Each playfield was more difficult to clear than prior one, and each Phase added even more difficulty and features. The Atari Jaguar was a video game console introduced to the U.S. market in November 1993 against the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as a powerful next generation platform. ...

The game featured good and bad power-ups somewhat similar to Arkanoid. There were unbreakable bricks, multi-hit bricks and stacked bricks. Ball movement was limited to the lower level of stacked bricks so breaking a lower brick would allow the stacked bricks to fall into the now vacated location. The game also featured a 2 player mode that allowed two people (or a person and the computer) to compete head to head. In this mode a player's ball could loop around to the other player's playfield and break the opponent's bricks. A 2X bonus was awarded for breaking your opponent's bricks.

Between phases the players were awarded bonus rounds of 3D Pong or Brick Target Practice. These rounds helped prepare the players for the more difficult phases to come.

Other releases

Breakout was once again updated for the IBM PC and also for the PlayStation. This version featured an ongoing storyline. In it, the character of Bouncer must rescue Daisy and his friends from the evil Batnix. With advice of Coach Steel, he travels different lands to rescue his friends: IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... The Sony PlayStation ) is a video game console of the 32/64-bit era, first produced by Sony Computer Entertainment in the mid-1990s. ...

• Tutorial: Bouncer must break out of Batnix's prison to rescue his friends. After that, he must escape a wolf.
• Egypt: Against a backdrop of Egyptian desert sits a giant pyramid, its secrets hidden from view. Only total destruction will unlock all its treasures. Beneath the pyramid are secret tombs through which Bouncer must battle in order to reach the Mummy's Lair, where a final battle will rescue his first friend.
• Farm: Bouncer must use his Breakout skills to defeat sheep, chickens, and ducks to rescue his second friend. After that, he must outrun another wolf.
• Castle: A giant Dragon carries a captive into a majestic, towering medieval castle surrounded by a deep moat. Bouncer must first defeat the knight guards on the drawbridge before he can enter the castle. Once Bouncer has completed several different challenges, he must climb the castle tower to the Dragon’s nest and do battle with the Dragon to save another one of his friends.
• Factory: Batnix has devised an evil robot henchman to guard his captives in his diabolical factory. A series of devious, puzzle-like levels must be negotiated before Bouncer battles the deranged robot to complete his mission.
• Space: Bouncer launches a rocket into space in order to chase the evil Batnix and rescue Daisy. Bouncer must use his Breakout skills to deflect killer asteroids.

In addition, many unofficial variations of Breakout were created for home computer platforms such as Apple II Plus, TRS-80 and PC. A version of the game called "Little Brick Out" was included on the DOS 3.2 System Master disk for the Apple II. The Apple II Plus was the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... While being one of the first personal computers, the Altair 8800 was considered a mere toy due its lack of abilities. ...

Notes

1. ^ http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/1970s/o.htm
2. ^ http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070504/edwards_02.shtml
3. ^ Wozniak, Steven: iWoz, pages 147-148. W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-06143-7
4. ^ Kent, Steven: The Ultimate History of Video Games, pages 71-73. Three Rivers, 2001. ISBN 0-7615-3643-4
5. ^ http://www.thedoteaters.com/p2_stage1.php
6. ^ http://www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=detail&id=3397
7. ^ Connick, Jack. "...And Then There Was Apple". Call-A.P.P.L.E. Oct 1986: 24.
8. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E3DE1039F934A15750C0A965948260
9. ^ http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_brad_stewart.html

W. W. Norton & Company is an American book publishing company that has remained independent since its founding. ... Three Rivers is the name of a number of places: In the United States of America: Three Rivers, California Three Rivers, Massachusetts Three Rivers, Michigan Three Rivers, Oregon Three Rivers, Texas In Canada Trois-Rivières, Quebec is referred to in English as Three Rivers In the United Kingdom: Three...

References

• Breakout at MobyGames
• The Dot Eaters entry on the development of Breakout

MobyGames is a website devoted to cataloging computer and video games, both past and present. ...

External links

• Atari's official online version of Super Breakout
• Super Breakout Officially licensed Shockwave version.