Breakout (video game)
1976 Atari arcade game
Breakout is a 1976 action video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for arcades; in Japan, it was released by Namco. The game was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow and prototyped via discrete logic chips by Steve Wozniak with assistance from Steve Jobs. In the game, eight rows of bricks line the top portion of the screen, and the player's goal is to destroy the bricks by repeatedly bouncing a ball off a paddle into them. The concept was predated by Ramtek's Clean Sweep (1974), but the game's designers were influenced by Atari's own Pong (1972). The arcade version of Breakout uses a monochrome display underneath a translucent colored overlay.
The game was a commercial success. It was among the top five highest-grossing arcade video games of 1976 in the U.S. and Japan, and among the top three in both countries for 1977. A port of the game was published in 1978 for the Atari 2600 with color graphics. An arcade sequel was released in 1978, Super Breakout, which introduced multiple bouncing balls.
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This entry incorporates text from “Breakout (video game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.