Timeline | 1978: Breakout for Atari 2600

Breakout was another Atari Arcade game that became an early hit on the Atari 2600.

Originally conceived by Nolan Bushnell as a single player version of the hit Atari game 'Pong', Breakout and its development would become a key event in the early history of not only the Atari 2600 but of all things Apple Computers. Bushnell assigned the project to Al Alcorn who in turn assigned Steve Jobs (who was partially working for Atari at the time) to make the prototype. Steve Jobs said he could have it done in 4 days, but in fact it was Steve Wozniak who did the chip designs and was able to get the design down to 44 chips (an impressive feat considering Atari usually made similar games with 150-170 chips at the time). He claimed to be able to make it in 42 chips but was too exhausted by the 4 day weekend of work to cut it down by the deadline. Steve Jobs took most of the credit for the design and only gave Wozniack a small portion of the payment he received from Atari (instead of the 50% he had promised).

The game itself is in fact basically a single player version of Pong (although ironically it does have a multiplayer mode) in which the paddle is stationed horizontally along the bottom of the screen and goal of the game is to keep the ball in play by bouncing it between the top of the screen and the paddle. While doing this portions of the top of the screen will break away as the player attempts to guide the ball to clear all of the screen or 'Breakout!' once this is done twice you reach the maximum score of the game.

A screenshot from the Atari 2600 port of Breakout

The Atari 2600 port of Breakout was designed by Brad Stewart. Stewart won a competition with fellow programmer Ian Shepard on the Arcade version of Breakout for the right to program the Atari 2600 version. Ironically Stewart not only had no input from the original designers but was unaware who they even were. The 2600 version of the game had a few small differences (different number of lines of breakable bricks, different number of lives, etc.). A notable addition however was the 'Breakthrough' mode in which the ball didn't bounce off of the breakable bricks but continued through until hitting a wall and bouncing back, this changed the game (mostly made it easier, but still it was a different mechanic) and Atari was able to market it as a whole new set of 'games' included on the cartridge.

Breakout would go on to spawn a sequel on the Atari 2600 - Super Breakout - and to influence the careers of important computer pioneers like Steve Wozniak (who worked hard to make the Apple II be able to play a version of breakout entirely done in software instead of the hardware chips previous required, this is an important step towards the games we have today that can be played on multiple platforms).

Breakout is still a simple game that is loads of fun to play but gets old relatively quickly.

Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)