Breakout

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.

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 USD$750, with an extra $100 each time a chip was eliminated from the prospected design. Jobs promised to complete a prototype within four days.

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.

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]

[edit] 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. If the player's paddle misses the ball's rebound, he or she loses a turn. The player has three turns to try to clear two screens of bricks. 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.

[edit] Re-releases

[edit] Ports

Atari 2600 home version of Breakout.

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.

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."[7] The game was published in 1978 and was conceptually the same, but with a few key differences. First, in this port, there were only six rows of bricks. Second, the player is given five turns to clear two walls instead of three. One notable addition was the Breakthru variant, where the ball does not bounce off of the bricks, but continues through them until it hits the wall. Atari had this term trademarked and used it as a sister term to Breakout to describe gameplay, especially in look-alike games and remakes.

[edit] 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.

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