The arcade version of Breakout uses a monochrome display underneath a translucent colored overlay. The concept was predated by Ramtek's Clean Sweep (1974), but the game's designers were influenced by Atari's own Pong (1972).

The Story Behind Breakout

The game reimagines the original with a horizontal perspective and introduces a combo system, power-ups, and a competitive multiplayer mode. The sequel features three distinct game modes with multi-ball gameplay. Clean Sweep became one of the top ten best-selling arcade video games of 1974 and sold a total of 3,500 arcade cabinets.

Bushnell assigned Steve Jobs, who was employed at Atari but was not an electrical engineer, to build a prototype. Throughout the endeavor, Wozniak served as the engineer, while Jobs functioned as the physical breadboarder and tester. It was co-developed by Adamvision Studios and SneakyBox.

How Breakout Plays

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. Ball speed increases at specific intervals: after four hits, after twelve hits, and after making contact with the orange and red rows. The paddle shrinks to one-half its initial size after the ball breaks through the red row and makes contact with the upper wall.

The original arcade cabinet of Breakout features artwork framing the game's premise as a prison escape. The color order from the bottom up is yellow, green, orange, and red. Because of how two-player mode manages internal screen memory, an additional scoring quirk exists: if a player completes the first screen on their final turn and the ball is subsequently lost, the cleared screen status transfers to the second player as an extra board, allowing a theoretical maximum score of 1,344 points before the game concludes.

Why Players Still Load It Up

In Japan, this genre became known as block kuzushi ("block breaker") games. Wozniak subsequently used these BASIC commands to program Brick Out, a software clone of his Atari hardware game. On the first annual Game Machine arcade revenue chart, Breakout ranked as the fourth highest-grossing arcade video game of 1976 in Japan, behind Taito's Ball Park (Tornado Baseball) and Speed Race DX, and Sega's Heavyweight Champ.

In addition, an estimated 40,000 unofficial pirated arcade units were illegally sold by the Yakuza in Asia after they made a deal with Namco. Breakout spawned an extensive genre of clones. The home console conversion for the Atari 2600 sold 256,265 cartridges during 1980.

Breakout — Frequently Asked Questions