Breakout is a Pong-like video game and arcade game published by Atari in 1976.

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 life when the ball touches the bottom of the screen, and to prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle that the ball can bounce off.

The original arcade version of Breakout was designed for a black and white monitor. However, the top part of the monitor had tinted strips of transparent material placed over it so that the bricks appeared to be in color.

This amazingly simple yet addictive game is the basis of countless remakes, including Super Breakout and Arkanoid.

The original circuit for Breakout was put together by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. Wozniak managed to program the original game with an incredibly small number of integrated circuits. Unfortunately, Wozniak's design was so complex that Atari's engineers could not fathom how it worked, and so were unable to put the original game into mass production; the game's circuits had to be redesigned before this could happen.

Despite this, the game eventually went into mass production, and became a huge success. It is fondly remembered by arcade game fans the world over.

External links

• Bat and Ball Java Game (http://www.webcogs.com/batandball.aspx) - Plays in a Web Browser
• The LGames Project (http://lgames.sourceforge.net/) includes two Breakout implementations, LBreakout and LBreakout2.