*So, Breakout is developed as part of the aftermath of Pong. After Pong was such a huge hit, a lot of other companies began developing their own knock off versions and so Atari decided what they really needed was a “sequel,” ie. a game that sort of mirrored Pong but was also a step in a new direction.
*Nolan Bushnell at Atari came up with a simple idea: single-player Pong. I suppose it’s the one flaw in Pong; you gotta find a friend – you can’t, or couldn’t then at least, just fire up a game on the spur of the moment to kill time while you’re home alone or whatever. So, his idea was simple. You have the paddle, you have the projectile, but instead of another player on the other side of the field, you have rows of bricks that you deplete by striking them with the projectile.
*Bushnell went to a guy you may have heard of to design the game: Steve Jobs. The fee was $750. Jobs didn’t really have the requisite circuit board knowledge so he roped in a friend you may have also heard about: Steve Wozniak.
*Jobs agreed to split the fee with Wozniak and he did so after they turned in the prototype and Jobs got the $750.00. What Jobs didn’t split was the $5,000.00 bonus he got from Atari. Jobs essentially tricked Wozniak into doing all the work (Jobs said Wozniak was the engineer and he was the “tester”) and then kept almost $5,500 dollars and gave Wozniak only $325.00. It would be years before Wozniak would learn about the deception. In an interview given in 1984, he would reference the prototype and state that he and Jobs had only been paid “700 bucks for it.”
*I mean, Steve Jobs. What a guy.
*Anyway, all this is by the wayside because Atari ended up scrapping the prototype and designing their own version. At Bushnell’s request, Wozniak had attempted to use as few computer chips as possible, but then Bushnell stated that he had used too few and that the game didn’t run properly. Wozniak would later state that the game as it ended up existing was exactly like his prototype without any discernable differences.
*I mean, Woz. Getting screwed quite a bit on this one. Everything? Not coming up Wozniak.
*So, it was released in the same way as Pong, first as an arcade cabinet and then as a home console game.
*So, I talked about it as single-player Pong and the difference that entailed in the game design. There’s one other major difference. The game is flipped on its side. In Pong, the projectile travelled horizontally across the screen; in Breakout, the paddle is at the bottom of the screen and the rows of bricks are across the top with the projectile moving vertically.
*This is more of a difference than you might think. I started playing this game right after playing a couple of rounds of Pong, at which, seriously, you guys, I’ve gotten totally pro at, and I’ll admit that it took me a minute to get in the habit of thinking in a horizontal mode.
*So, I’m playing the version of this that’s on the Atari Flashback Console. I talked about it before; it’s what I played Pong on. As with Pong, there are a few differences between this and the absolute original version of the game. It was original to arcades, of course, but the version I’m playing is the oldest home version, the Atari 2600 release.
*Arcade version had eight rows of bricks, four different colors; home version has six rows, six colors. In the arcade, you had three projectiles; in the home version, you get five.
*Thank God.
*Okay, so let’s get into it.
*I immediately toggled the difficulty to easy, increasing the size of my platform. I’m no idiot.
*So, things got off to a really slow start. I was just not doing very well. I mean, like clearing only the lowest row of bricks, plus maybe a couple on row two before I burned out my five chances.
*Oh, did I say what I’m considering a win state? This version will just continue to give you screens as long as you keep your ball in play, so you clear screen one, you automatically get another one and so on and so on. There’s no difference in these screens. In the original home version, you would get a win state after completing two screens. So that’s what I’m going for here; five projectiles – two screens.
*It’s super-easy to keep going. As with Pong, you just hit a single button and you’re ready to start again.
*Okay, so bricks on the bottom couple of rows are worth one point each, but as you get higher, they start to have higher point values. However, also as you get higher on the wall, the gameplay gets faster. So, the first time you hit a brick on row four, the speed of the projectile gets faster.
*Eventually, I found myself hitting a wall of sorts.
*rimshot*
*I found it extremely hard to return shots once you got up to the final row. The projectile just moved way too fast. I eventually got to where I could maybe return two or three times at the super-fast speed, but it was just too hard to control the paddle with the necessary precision.
*Oh, I should mention the sort of strategic method to use. You want to break through the entire wall as quickly as possible. You shouldn’t be aiming to clear row one, then row two, etc. You should be trying to hammer a single spot and get your projectile all the way up and through the wall. Because once you break through the top row, you’re in that little empty space at the top of the screen. And the projectile just bounces around up there for a while, clearing bricks off the top like a madman.
*As with Pong, it isn’t super-easy to control where the projectile goes, but if you can just make a hole all the way through the wall at one spot, then you’re going to start making progress.
*The first time I managed to pull that off was super-cool. The screen starts flashing and there’s just this cacophony of beeps and the score just starts rocketing upwards.
*I only did that a couple of times.
*Okay, so, spoilers, guys. Let’s just cut to the chase. I didn’t beat this game.
*Game three of this list of 1,001 games. And I couldn’t beat it. This is a disaster.
*So, like I said before I’m going to try to beat the games I play here. The original victory state was clearing two screens worth of blocks, so I was setting that as my goal. Clearing two screens with five projectiles. That is literally insane to me now that I’ve been trying. Like, I can’t even comprehend how a human could do that. Because it is just SO FAST when the projectile breaks through to those last couple of rows.
*So, I decided to take another tack after I played Breakout for more than a month and couldn’t really progress any farther. As long as I was getting better, that was one thing, but once I got to break through the bricks once, I really could never get any better than that. So I never even cleared the first screen.
*So, this other tack was to look up a version that I could play online. When I started playing the game this time on the console, I thought I remembered playing the game online before and being pretty good at it. So I located it online and played it and . . . I beat it on my second time. Got through both screens with just five projectiles on my second attempt.
*So I think it’s safe to say that the issue with the console version has to do with the mechanics of the game. I just didn’t have precise or quick enough control of the paddle controller. Using a mouse to control the platform, I won immediately.
*So, I’m glad I played with the console and this experience does make me know that I’m right to try to play the game in the closest possible way to the original release. This has really underlined for me how the control scheme/mechanics can make for totally difference experiences in playing a game.
*Anyway, I then went on YouTube and decided to see if I could find a playthrough of someone beating the game on the console I had, just because. I wasn’t able to find anybody; I found a couple of people who got really close, but nobody who had beat the game on console using the paddle controller. Maybe I’m not as bad as I thought. It might just actually be that hard.
*And then finally I decided to use a “cheat” on the Atari console. There’s a way to put the console on “demo mode,” ie. you get unlimited projectiles. As soon as a projectile drops off the bottom of the screen, there’s a beep and a new one flies up. I messed around with this for a while. It doesn’t keep score and, annoyingly, the color scheme changes every few seconds, which kind of gives you a headache.
*Anyway, playing this way was crazy, because once I got down to just having a few bricks left and the ball was just constantly moving at a fast speed, it was nigh to impossible to even rebound the ball at all. Yeah, there’s no way I was ever going to beat this in regular mode.
*I honestly think the hardest bit of the game is when you’re down to just like four or five bricks up top and they’re just kind of randomly scattered across the top of the screen. Because it is so hard to control the projectile, so it’s really hard to get those last few bricks. The projectile just bounces all around, missing all the bricks and it’s really easy to choke in those last few moments and lose the projectile.
*Anyway, that does bring up something. I think if a brick loses its support, it should fall. Like I don’t think a brick should just be hanging there in mid-air with no other bricks around it. That doesn’t make any sense. If a brick has no connection to the sides of the screen, how is it there? This is a brick wall suspended in mid-air, right? Like built from one side of the screen to the other. Because gravity is definitely making the projectile fall to the bottom of the screen. I’m at the bottom and the wall is close to the top. So, if a brick is just surrounded by black, you’re essentially saying it’s just hanging in mid-air. I don’t get that.
*I’m probably going to have to stop thinking quite so literally if I want this project to work.
*Anyway, Breakout definitely holds up, at least on the console, in one serious way. It’s still as hard as ****. Is it fun? Well, it wasn’t a game I could beat, so it did kind of eventually get frustrating. The validation of breaking through to the top level of the screen was always cool, but that honestly didn’t happen all that often for me. I talked about how I could see myself continuing to play Oregon Trail & Pong every now and then and I have done so. I don’t think I’ll return to Breakout.
*Though you should probably play it; it is a very important piece of video game history. And, if you don’t play it on an Atari console, it’s even kind of easy to beat. But I’m done with it, I think.
*Okay, so next time, it’s the introduction of several significant elements. It’s the first shooter on this project (unless you count typing “Bang” in Oregon Trail) and let’s just say there’s a huge, huge step-up in terms of graphics. Join me next time as we move into 1977 for Boot Hill.