Retronauts - 480: Retronauts Episode 480: Breakout

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Jeremy Parish and Kevin Bunch spin back into the 1970s to talk about one of gaming's most important and influential foundational works and where it fits into the grand scheme of the medium's evolution: Atari's Breakout. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, a real ballbreaker of an episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. According to my notes, 479. I can put an echo flange effect on that if you want to make it more dramatic. But, you know, at this point, there's so many episodes. What's another one between friends? But this one's a little different. It's very improvisational, very kind of small, just two people. people and about a very specific topic, but it just seemed a thing to do based on a lot of different kind of threads that have been weaving around in my professional and side project life. So here with me on this episode, we have, uh, hi, I'm Kevin Bunch. I do the, uh, YouTube series Atari Archive. The YouTube series and the upcoming book, which I have been laying out and

editing in preparation of its publication, probably very early next year. And it's great. And it helped inspire this episode, because looking over the breakout article or Breakaway 4, if you prefer, you Sears fans, I just was reminded of how influential and significant that game is. And it gets touched on on Retronauts from time to time, but we really don't go delving much into 1970s video games, because what is there really to say? But in terms of breakout, there's a lot to say. And if you remember the live panel that we recorded and published from Midwest Gaming Classic this year, Kevin was up there on that panel to talk about the influence of breakout on Japanese games and its importance over there. That helped inspire this also. And also, just the

place of breakout in video game evolution is something that I've alluded to. to quite a few times in my video series, you know, talking about games like Gallagher and then Zavius, you know, going on to bullet hell shooters and things like that. Like all of those descend from breakout, which may seem counterintuitive because you're breaking blocks in this game with a paddle as opposed to shooting stuff with a spaceship. But it all kind of is an evolutionary continuum. And breakout's not the beginning of that continuum, but it's very close to the beginning and really is an inflection point from which many things emerged. And, you know, I had kind of made that observation just sort of offhandedly in my videos a while back thinking,

oh, I came across something interesting and maybe this is BS, but it seems to hold up for me. And then, you know, Kevin, you've made much more educated and researched claims to the exact same thing. So in my naivety, I stumbled across something that turned out to be true, but you've documented it so much more effectively than me just saying like, hey, look, these things are alike. So that's why you're here to walk us through the history of a very old, but very, very important game. Yeah, I mean, it's just as you said, who knew that something like, I don't know, Mushihime Futari draws its influences from breakout, but we have it down, you know, direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Exactly. The princess's mouth. The bug, the bug's mouth, I guess. Anyway, yes. I mean, no one is, no one is saying that when, what is that, cave sat down to create Mushihime Sama. They said, you know, we should do a really cool variant on breakdown.

or Breakout, that would be, that would be great. Let's make it about a princess writing bugs and shooting other bugs. I mean, it's, you know, it's a matter of evolution. So it's tracing back the roots and how games emerged from, you know, one another over time and how these influences can be sort of drawn back to sort of an origin point. And Breakout really does hold an important place in video game history. So yeah, Kevin, what was? What was the first time you ever played breakout? I'm curious. Ooh, boy. So I think we didn't have it for our Atari 2,600, but I believe my aunt did, and that's where I played it initially. And I think my grandparents had super breakout, and eventually all of those ended up coming to me because they didn't want their old Atari games.

They knew I cared about them. So that's sort of where that kicked off. I remember reading about stuff like Arkanoid and Alleyway and thinking, wow, these just sound like breakout. But breakout with lasers and Mario. Yeah, I mean, that's, that was a big deal for me as a child who liked Mario and lasers, but, yeah, it goes back a long ways into that sort of murky period of your childhood that you just can't delineate things very well. Yeah, I mean, that's the same for me. I couldn't even begin to guess the first time I saw Breakout or played it. It's just one of those things.

You know, there are some video games that I have very specific memories of. But this is one of those that's just kind of, it's like background radiation almost. It's just, it's always been there. Like, I remember the first time I played Miss Pac-Man, and that was kind of my awakening, like video games. These exist and are cool. But breakout? I don't know. It was just there, like Pong.

I have no idea when I first saw that. My family had a Sears Telostar Pong console that had four Pong variants on it, but they were just Pong variants. They weren't, they didn't have a breakdown or breakout. I don't know why I keep calling a breakdown, a breakout variant. So that wouldn't have been my introduction. I don't know. It was just, it's just one of those things. Like, I just know it. It's, you know, it's almost like a genetic memory or something, you know, like how do beavers know how to make a dam? do ants know how to build their nest? They just do. Just like I just know that when I see a little paddle at the bottom of the screen, I got to make a ball bounce up and hit bricks at the top and break them away. That's just, it's just instinctual. I'm just picturing the birds navigating

to where the ball is going to bounce off the bricks now. I feel like there probably is some variant of that somewhere. You know, Archenoid has the little things that come out and you can smash them up and they get in the way. So, you know, just change that to like birds, like dropping bricks into the, to the layer to fill things back up as you break them away. I don't know. There's got to be, there's got to be something.

There's so many, like, when you look into the Japanese side of things, there have been so many breakout variants published. Even I would say more so than in America. Like, if you look up Block Kuzushi, there's dozens of games. games. That's just the generic name for block breaking, basically. And there have been so many games just called, it's some variant of block kuzushi released in Japan that, you know, most of them never made it here. But they're just out there. People love hitting a ball with a paddle and breaking bricks. It's just, it's, you know, it's primal. It's, you see a snake and you know it's

dangerous. You see a brick and you know you got to hit it with a ball. Yeah, God, geez, there's that one S&K breakout clone, one of the earliest games. And I remember it distinctly because it has the space battleship Yamato in there. Oh, wow. Not the battleship Yamato, but the space one. Yes. Is it actually licensed? I don't think so.

I don't think it was. Yeah, things were kind of fast and loose back then. But, you know, I think if you finished off the wall, the battleship would come out. and I think you could try and hit it with the ball something to that extent. Why not? Yeah. Ah, yeah.

Everyone borrowed things back then. You know, like, you know, as in case, Yoshaku was borrowed by Epic for their super, or they're just their cassette vision. It was like the lead, the lead title for that console. And as far as I can tell, there's no, there's no licensing there. There's no copyright credit or anything like that. They were just like, hey, that company made a cool game.

Let's put that on our console and call it the exact same thing. It can look exactly the same and work exactly the same. So, yeah, it's not surprising. This was a, this was the primal era of video games, you know, up through, say, like, 1980-ish, you know, and even beyond to some degree. But back up to that point, before video games really hit it big and became sort of, you know, an international concern where people really started paying attention to them and large companies started to kind of rub their hands together greedily and say, oh, there's money to be made here. It was really just kind of anything goes. And so... Anything went.

You know, it makes sense that, you know, breakout emerged from basically an attempt to break away from, literally break away from pawn clones and then would go on to be copied and iterated on and eventually evolved and take it to the next level. That was just, you know, it was a very, there wasn't a lot of technology back then for video games. It was all pretty limited. So you kind of had to do what you could get by with. And that mostly involved moving a thing around and hitting another thing. I'm Colette and I'm at it's time to talk about the most important topic facing humanity climate change oh okay video games every week on Colette and Matt have entered the chat we have in-depth conversations about the games we are currently playing we also talk to people who make

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Sounds good. So, yeah, as you can probably guess, breakouts origins do come from Pong, the original ball and paddle game. Atari put that out towards the very end of 1972. They couldn't keep up with the production requirements and the demand. So a bunch of other companies started to produce their own clones to fill in that gap. It's a huge hit across 73 and into 74, but it started falling apart after that point because, you know, at the end of the day, Pong's a pretty straightforward game. You know, you've got your paddles on either side, you're bouncing a ball back and forth between two players.

So it needs to be two players, and you need to have ball and paddle, and you can dress that up however you want, but it's generally going to play the same. Yeah, were there single-player pong variants in arcades at that point, at any point in the mid-70s, or was that just not a thing anyone did? I'm not aware of any single-player pongs, like having some sort of computer opponent to fight or even just sort of a racquetball bounce off the wall sort of thing. There might have been, there's a couple hundred pong clones, and I have not dug into all of them. but I don't think there were any along those specific lines. But, you know, around early 1974, you got sort of the proto breakout, and that was produced by a company called Ram Tech and one of their early game-making hires a person named Howell Ivy,

who incidentally went on to work at Sega, if I remember, as one of their executives. So this was the start of a very lengthy career form in arcade video. games. But Ivy put together a game called Clean Sweep, and this is a single-player ball and paddle game where the paddle has been moved to the bottom of the screen. It's no longer on one of the left or right sides. And instead of an opposing paddle or anything, you have dots slayed throughout the entire playfield, and your job is to bounce your ball into those. And, you know, it doesn't bounce off of the dots. It keeps going as it hits them.

sort of a breakthrough mechanic, but yeah, wow, looking at footage of this is bringing back a primal memory of something. I can't imagine that I ever played CleanSuite because it's a little before my time, but just this style of game. Like, I've

definitely seen variants on this through the years. I love that Ramtech was also one of the first companies that jumped into the Pong craze. Like, their engineers saw Pong at the handicapped have her in that, you know, Atari was location testing their prototype apps. They sort of reversed

it, engineered it from there and put out their clone really early on in 73. So it's very funny. It's funny what a small world it was, you know, the video games industry back then, back when there were like three companies making video games. And then a whole bunch of, you know, electromechanical companies making pawn clones. But yeah, there is footage of clean sweep. It's on YouTube. You can look it up. I don't think you can play it per se because it's a, it's not really an emulated game outside. Yeah, is it TTL or? Yes. Yeah, it uses transistor, transistor logic. So it's just a bunch of integrated circuits, uh, running your game logic. I think it runs in the old dice emulator, but I don't know how well dice runs on modern computer anymore since it's like a decade

old. Yeah, that's, uh, that's a, that's a name from the past. That's almost as old as clean sweep at this point. I feel like, you know, at some point, someone's going to sit down and make a core for this and mister. But for the time being, yeah, it's pretty much just footage. And there's not, there's not that much to it. It's very simplistic. I'm curious, do you know if there's, like, you mentioned electro-mechanical games. Were there electro-mechanical machines that kind of had this style of gameplay, the idea of, like, bouncing a ball, you know, almost like pinball, but, you know, knocking down pins or whatever instead of trying to avoid falling into a hole and, you know, having a complex field, but basically just an open field of objects to knock down.

Hmm. You know, I'm not an expert on electromechanical games. Pinball does seem like the most likely origin for this, especially since the follow-up to Clean Sweep is sort of a TV pinball sort of game. But beyond that, that's a good question. Yeah, I have very little knowledge of EM games, so I just, I couldn't even begin to guess. It'd be great to have an expert on some time to talk, like, walk us through the history of electromechanical games. But it's just, you know, it's hard to find really solid information about a lot of those online. Like, Some games, you know, by big makers will have pretty good documentation online, but most of that's just lost history. So who can say, I guess, certainly not us, if this had, you know,

a pre-video game antecedent. But, you know, like you mentioned, there's a real convergence, I think, or at least maybe a unity between pinball and breakout style games. And eventually they would diverge. But for a long time, they tended to be kind of, we'll talk about this later, but they tended to be kind of interchangeable in a lot of senses. When you played a pinball video game, a lot of times it was just going to be a weird variant on breakout. Yeah, going back to your one point, I think a lot of the people who know about EM games are just digging into old trade periodicals, and I don't even know where they find half of these things.

Yeah, so you're talking to like gaming Alexandria and that sort of thing. There's a couple people in there that do that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, anytime I check the Discord for Gaming Alexandria, I just like read through some of the scans and think, like, where do you even know to look for this stuff? There's magazines, not that I'm an expert on, you know, 1970s trade publications by any stretch of the imagination, but I just would never have guessed that these things existed. But here they are out there, just waiting to. to be scanned, dripping with information that no one's bothered to extract yet.

Yeah, I guess it's a bit of a tangent, but I remember a couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, I went out to the Library of Congress and scanned in all of their vending times, music and games issues, which ran for like two years. It was a spinoff of vending times that just focused on music and games. And, yeah, just all of these EM machines that I had never heard of in my entire life, just splattered all over these pages from companies like Williams and Bally and Sega. It's all these people that, or all these companies rather, that you hear of so much in video game spaces. But, you know, here they were making stuff back then.

Yeah, I wish I had known about the trade magazines back when I was doing my SG-1000 coverage because I feel like a lot of Sega's early video games have roots, you know, kind of like with Nintendo, how they have roots for things like Duck Hunt and the toys that they made. I feel like Sega, you know, having been in the arcade amusement business for so long, a lot of their concepts must have come from like direct interpretations of things that they had created. But like with their SG-1000 Sega Pinball game or Sega Flipper is what it's called, I looked, you know, all over to see if I could find a pinball table that they based their video game on. But, you know, it's just, it's really difficult to find that information.

I couldn't come up with anything. when I was covering the Pachinko games for the system. I was like, Sega made so many Pachinko games. Like, Sega was kind of the big Pachinko distributor, and a lot of those even made it into the U.S., but how do you find, like, the specific pin arrangement that they duplicated for the video game, if they even did?

Yeah, so there's so much of this kind of primal pre-video game information that is maybe not, like, crucially important, to much of anyone, but is still, I think, valuable to dig up and unearth, and I, you know, I have a lot of respect for the people who do that. I am not any good at it. I'm not a researcher, it turns out. So I just kind of do what I can. I bluff and just kind of go with what I've picked up and cleaned over the years and packaged it all up to make it look nice and sound smart. Anyway, there you go. Check your research libraries, kids. Right. Give them money. But anyway, yes, so clean sweep turns out to be extremely influential for breakout, but before we get to that, there's one other game I want to sort of pick out, and it's their follow-up knockout, which they never produced themselves.

They seem to have licensed or got it cloned by other companies like Exidy and Chicago Coin and Nutting Associates. And this is sort of a variant on clean sweep. You don't have the field of dots anymore. Now you have these sort of drop targets on the screen. And there are also... It's a grid of, what, 16 little blocks? Yeah. And then there's also a moving block at the very top.

And that's sort of your moving target. And there's little pockets on the side that you can try and nail the ball into to get some bonus points. So it's got some more pinball. features than Clean Sweep. This is sort of what I consider the progenitor of the paddle pinball subgenre, which, you know, had a number of games produced for it over the 70s and a little bit into the 80s. Yeah, man, that's a concept that really just kind of went away, huh? Like, I don't know that I've ever come across a contemporary, like to me, paddle pinball-style game.

They all seem to have kind of faded away like 19. 182, 83, like once Nintendo came out with NES pinball or Famicom pinball in 1984, everyone was like, oh, that's how you do it. And that's how they all went from that point. Yeah, it just seems like once you could get pretty decent pinball physics on your video game, why would you make it breakout style? But, you know, it's an interesting little subgenre of breakout games. I think we'll talk about a couple, but yeah. Yeah, I think physics is the big distinguishing element here, because the ball, and breakout and Pong, they have kind of like a frictionless inertia, I guess you would say.

Like, they either always move at the same rate or they steadily accelerate. You know, like Pong, the ball gets, I think the ball gets faster the more you hit it, right? Or if you, like, hit it at a certain angle, like, if you hit the very tip of the paddle against the ball, then it'll carry them at a really sharp angle and that causes it to move faster. but pinball you know obviously the ball is meant to have kind of a slightly you know a little bit of gravity to it so it has kind of an arc when you when you flip it upward it's going to kind of reach a peak and then roll back down and accelerate as it descends and that's you know kind of to your point too advanced for some of the TTL games of the 70s to duplicate but

you know once you got into more advanced machines they could kind of capture that physics simulation, and so maybe that's why the style went away, because I don't know that the pinball, proper pinball physics would work with the breakout paddle. I don't know. It'd be an interesting combination. I can't think of any games I've played that try that. There are a couple that are kind of in that line. There's one whose name is escaping me, but it's a very interesting arcade cabinet because

it's built to look like a pinball table, but you know, you've got the video. game screen in there and the flipper buttons on either side will activate your paddle basically and it'll bounce out from the wall I guess and that's what you use to bounce the ball back up

so it's a very interesting hybrid and I wish I could remember the name of it they all have such similar names it's really easy for me to get a mixed up is a TV flipper maybe I don't know but God on that aside I would love to talk about video pinball stuff

but there's a 74 Atari game called Pin-Pong. You should look it up sometime. And that's a TTL pinball game that it's not quite a breakout-style paddle pin, but it's a pretty good rendition of having physics in a Pong-style hardware game. Actually, I think there's definitely room for a video pinball episode at some point. So I'll table that concept. I'll put in the notes for the future. But in the meantime, we're talking about breakout.

And having kind of laid the groundwork with Pong and Clean Sweep and what was the other one, knockout. Now I think we can talk about the main event. Yeah. Here we are. Breakout. For those unfamiliar, here's a game where you are bouncing a ball off of a paddle into a wall, and you are destroying said wall brick by brick. The higher the bricks are up in the wall, the more points you get. If you clear out the entire wall, a second one will spawn. If you clear that out, the game doesn't have anything else for you, and it just sort of goes until you let the ball die. It's the original concept for this.

So I guess first off, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Some years ago, they got all of these old Atari coin-op records, and this included a bunch of memos related to the creation of breakout. And according to one from January 1975 for a brainstorming retreat, Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow put together this sort of initial idea and their thought was to have a game that was like Clean Sweep

except now you had an area that you had to knock out originally you have this closed field and you have to knock out something to open it up and that's sort of where the progenitor of breakout came from so they directly linked it to Clean Sweep so that's how we know that those two are you know one is inspired by the other interesting and your notes also mentioned the quote unquote recent racquetball craze which i guess i didn't realize that was kind of a specific thing to the 70s but it does sort of make sense like you know stuff like racquetball and hilae like they were really that was just like trindy stuff that they were introducing in the 70s and 60s, I guess as the idea of fitness became, you know, the idea of like people being involved in sports that aren't necessarily organized team sports or something like golf or tennis,

a smaller or more like contained variance. So I hadn't really considered that. But yeah, that does seem all to kind of line up. Yeah, it really tracks once you think about it for a second. I'm like, oh yeah, you are bouncing a ball off a wall. So. Yeah, the first time I had ever heard of Hailei was with that Kaliko or Sears or whatever Telostar machine. One of the variants was called Highalai, which has nothing to do with the actual sport of Highalai, I think. But, you know, it was pretty much racquetball, but as Pong. So, you know, that's a, that all kind of falls together there for me. And, you know, at this point, this is before microprocessors had been introduced for, you know, arcade video games.

I think the first one had just been introduced for pinball machines in, what, 75, 76. So this was still pretty early on. So this had to be a TTL game. At this point, TTL games were, you know, upwards of 100 chips, frequently closing it on 200, depending on the game. So Bushnell and Bristow, they offered up this, bonus. If you could get this game concept put together in under 120 ICs, we will pay you a bonus for every chip you don't use under that. So I'm not, I'm not a technical expert. So when you talk about TTL machines and you talk about chips in those, like what are these individual

chips? Are they just, do they just perform like a single routine or something? It's like a specific function. It's the 74 series of integrated circuits. I I think a lot of these are still in production because there's still use case for them. But they are essentially just, you know, circuits compressed into a little chip, and they can do whatever it is they're designed to do, and no more. You can't program anything into them. They're just laid out on the board to produce your game logic, or multiple boards, depending on the game. So basically, creating a game at this point was almost like the process of

programming itself. Instead of sitting down and writing code, you would have all these different chips with different functions and kind of figure out how they should interconnect and relate to one another, and that would create your game logic. Yeah, more or less. It's sort of a hardware engineering take on your video game design. That sounds difficult. Yes, it's an expensive process, because all these chips add up. And if something goes wrong, you know, you have to try and pin down what the error is. So, you know, the distributors and the operators of these things weren't thrilled about TTL because it was a pain to troubleshoot. But, you know, that's what they had to work with at the time. And I guess that all ties into, you know,

kind of the big breakout legacy and the careers that it kind of launched. So again, I will yield the Florida U to kind of segue into the discussion of the complexities of TTL design and the genius involved in working efficiently within that structure. Yeah, so none of Atari's designers, like their main roster of designers, wanted to work on this because at this point, ball and pedal, that fad was over, and none of the games that were coming out at that point in that area were really selling all that well. So a technician who worked at the company, and at that time, that was sort of an assistant to the designer. You were the person who was helping put together the boards. A technician named Steve Jobs volunteered to take up this game design challenge so he could finance a trip up to Oregon. That's funny. That's a funny coincidence, because I know this other guy named Steve Jobs, who, you know, became really important in the computing space, making Apple computer.

Yeah. And it's the same guy. Oh, my God. What a shock. Okay. Coincidentally, he wanted to go to Oregon for an apple harvest. Wait. So, okay.

That's what he wanted to fund with with breakout. He was a very strange person, especially at this time. Hmm? But, yes. So he didn't bathe. He did not bathe. He thought that eating an all-fruit diet would naturally let him smell good and all that fun stuff.

Sure. Yeah. Atari put him on the night shift, even though they didn't have a night shift, because no one liked working with him. But apparently he was buddy-buddy with Nolan Bushnell,

so they kept him on staff for a while. So, yeah, Jobs wanted this job. They knew he didn't know the first thing about designing a game, but they knew he knew people who knew about designing games because he had, in previous occasions, brought his friend Steve Wozniak, in to sort of show him around and meet people.

And on one of these trips, Wozniak was talking about a homemade Pong game he had built using TTL integrated circuits. I think, I don't remember if I wrote it down, but it's, yeah, 28. 28. Yes, he built this in 28 TTL chips. And it had some additional bells and whistles that the arcade versions didn't. So they showed this to Al Alcorn, who made the original Pong. And I guess he offered him a job at that point. And Lazzniak said, no, I like where I'm at at HP.

But he was, he knew the Atari people. They knew who he was. They knew that he was friends with Steve Jobs. So, you know, if Jobs was going to get anyone else involved on this, they might be able to get a game out of him. Yeah. And again, going back to what I said earlier, it was a very small world at this point. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

All these people who were involved in tech in, you know, the Silicon Valley, they all pretty much knew each other. And then all of these companies that were involved in that, they were a little incestuous with their staff, just, you know, bouncing around between each other. So, yeah, Jobs told Wozniak that if he helped him with this, he would give him half of the pay, the $700 that Atari was going to pay him for this. He did not mention that there was a bonus involved. Oh, and he told Wozniak that they had to do this in four days. the deadline that gave them. Really, it was just deadline. Jobs gave him because Jobs wanted to go on this apple orchard harvested a communal farm in Oregon, but Wozniak didn't know that part. So he designed a prototype of breakout that used 42 TTL chips, and Jobs did his technician thing

and breadboarded this and wire wrapped it and made it into a functioning prototype unit. It didn't have any sound effects that didn't keep score on. screen. Instead, it had a couple little LED lights that did the score tracking for you. It had no mechanism to detect if you put a coin in. And it was also too complex for Atari's manufacturing facilities to mass produce. But it did technically meet the requirements to get the bonus because they never said it had to be producible. It's just that it had to work. So I'm curious. This has always confused me about this anecdote, the story. is that he created a simplified machine using fewer TTL chips,

but somehow it was too complicated to be mass produced. How does that work exactly? I remember reading about this, and I should have marked it down in the notes. If I remember correctly, the design he came up with, it was too small a scale for their manufacturing facilities. Like, everything was too compressed. And I don't think they had the capability. I might be wrong on this, but that's what my vague recollection is from what I was digging into this a couple of years ago.

So basically it was too efficient for them, too tidy and compact. So, you know, they could just add in the TTL chips for scorekeeping and coin detection and boom, magic. I mean, from what I understand, this did, like this was the basis for the eventual game they made, wasn't it? Yeah. I guess we can talk real quick about the weird timeline for this game. So, you know, this initial concept, the brainstorming session, that was in January, and we know that Wozniak must have had this game done by April because in April 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club put out their newsletter, and he had a little blurb in there

talking about a game he made called Breakthrough, as well as his Pong game. So that is clearly based off of, you know, what he did. year at Atari with breakout, just based on the name. So we know that they had this done in the spring, and, you know, Jobs was off to do his thing with $5,000 in his pocket, which is an absurd amount of money. That's what... In 1975. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you could buy a car with that.

Yeah, that would be the equivalent of like $40,000 or $50,000 now. Yeah. I think this was, 75 would have been before the hyperinflation of the late 70s. So, yeah, it was. still, like, the dollar bought a lot at that point. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he's doing really well for himself off of that one. So later in the year, Atari goes to their subsidiary cyan engineering.

They ask their guy, Gary Waters, there, to put together a version of breakout that they can produce in large quantities and has all these features that the original prototype did not include. And that was about 100 ICs, so not quite as efficient as the one that Wozniak put together, but still better than what

Bushnell and Bristow were hoping for in the first place. Sorry, going back to the timeline, here's a weird thing. Just out of curiosity, I looked up what the best season for harvesting apples in Oregon is. And it's July through November. So what the hell was Steve Jobs

doing going up to harvest apples in, like, February, like, what kind of apples do you harvest in Oregon in February? Like, crap apples? I don't know. It's a good question. He was, he was microdosing a little too much at that point, I think, just making up things and imagining them. Don't Granny Smith come in in the early spring? I don't quite remember. I think there are. Who wants to eat a Granny Smith? Oh, man. My wife hates them. I love them. So that's a... Okay, well, that's marriage all kinds. But, yeah, so Waters finished this later in the year.

In the interim, there are a variety of Atari memos that talk about two games. One's called Brick, and the other is called Breakthrough. They're both shelved by the middle of the year. They might or may not be connected to each other and breakout, I don't know, but either way, breakout itself came out the following springtime in 76 and ended up being a massive hit. And by massive hit, you mean how many units did it sell? Somewhere between 11 and 15,000 units domestically. And for reference, at this point, most coin-out games were doing numbers in, you know,

the hundreds or the low thousands. So this was pretty big. Yeah, it's just wild to look at these numbers and think, man, just a massive global hit, 15,000 units. Holy cow. But, you know, you are dealing with arcade machines here. And the best-selling arcade machines still sold, what, like maybe 100,000? There might have been one or two, like, Street Fighter or Pac-Man that hit a quarter of a million or something.

But, yeah, it was just thousands was always the quantity people were dealing with. And the industry was tiny here at this point. So, yeah, it's a little bit of a disconnect, but it just speaks to kind of, you know, the sort of early bootstrap days of video gaming. Yeah. And because it was such a big hit, you know, Atari decided that once they started producing more home games that weren't just Pong, they had to include breakout too. So it's on their video pinball, standalone dedicated units.

that came out in 77 and got brought over to Japan by Epic. And I just saw this a few weeks ago, but apparently video pinball was also licensed out over in Japan as a coin-op unit, which I don't know who did that. That information was not in this snippet I saw, but... So you're talking about like the standalone console was distributed as an arcade machine there. Yes, and a home unit from Epic. So an arcade unit that had you playing video pinball and breakout, and I guess that weird basketball game on there.

So that was probably really cool for somebody. Yeah, I didn't realize the Epic connection when I mentioned Epic earlier in their cassette vision system. But the cassette vision system, basically, that was technically an interchangeable cartridge-based console, but all the logic and stuff for the games was in the cartridges. So the console, it was kind of like the microvision where it was just like a shell that, you know, had a controller attached to it and provided power and video output. But most of the heavy lifting was done by the cartridges. So they took like their standalone dedicated like their space invaders clone and basically consulized it and then made it interchangeable.

So there's kind of a little bit of a connection here too with, you know, this kind of facet of the, the Japanese console industry in a sort of roundabout way to, to break out just because these early dedicated machines kind of gave Epoch their entree into the console space. Not that, not that they actually managed to move the needle at all, like no one cares about Epic's machines, but they were, you know, they could have been a viable competitor to Sega and Nintendo at some point. They just weren't. Does there, does their pawn cartridge on the cassette vision have breakout on there? I want to say no, but at the moment all of my cartridges are with Krista Lee to be recapped because you have to recap cartridges for the cassette vision because it's such a weird machine and like I said, all the logic is in the machines, in the cartridges.

That's something that needs a Mr. core. Yeah, let's see. Osaku Baseball, Galaxian, sports. Maybe the sports game. Oh, there is something called, no, Monster Block is not a breakout game. It's a Pingo ripoff. That's right. So, yeah, yeah, it looks like there was no, no breakout knockoff. Maybe that was kind of Pass A by 1981 when the Cassette Vision came out. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, Atari also put it on their 2600, the VCS. That was sort of their best-selling game on the platform before Space Invaders came along, at least as far as I can tell anecdotally. And it got cloned to pretty much every piece of hardware that someone could get away with it. So like Wozniak did a version of it on the Apple 2 called Breakout, two words.

There's also weird ones for like The Odyssey 2 has Blockout Breakdown, which has little people running around in the wall and they can rebuild it. and you can try and knock them out too. It's very strange. That sounds kind of cool, actually. Although I think you're kind of underselling what Wozniak did with the Apple 2. It's not that he made a version of breakout for Apple 2. He kind of designed the hardware specifically to be able to play his own breakout clone. He turned the game sideways because of the screen orientation.

But the capabilities of the Apple 2 were designed and developed in part by, him to be able to play that game. So that was one of the best selling computers for a long time and one of the most enduring computers, definitely. And, you know, so many people got their start on Apple II,

so many games got their start on Apple II, and it all goes back to breakout. Yeah, that's true. He is quoted as saying that he built the paddle controller, the analog controller inputs for breakout. It's got the

audio it does for breakout, yeah, yeah. The color generating capabilities, such as they are. The weirdest color generating. It's a, it's a delight. Half the time I boot up an Apple 2, and I'm not sure if it's actually working properly with those color generating. What, orange, purple, and green isn't like a natural worldview to you? You know, they were trying real hard without having to spend a lot of money, and I respect it, because that's the exact same sort of, uh,

design philosophy behind his original breakout clone. You know, how can we get as many capabilities as we can out of this without using as many parts as we would normally have to? And in both cases, Steve Jobs got really, really rich. Yep. You know, All right. So that's kind of the origin story for breakout. But it didn't just succeed domestically. Like one of the big things that I don't think people really talk. talk about that much is just how popular breakout was in Japan.

Mm-hmm. How did that happen? I mean, not accounting for taste, just like, how did the game kind of make its way into Japan? Right, right. So distribution of breakout and, you know, basically most of Atari stuff at that point was handled by Namco. Namco had purchased Atari's Japanese subsidiary in 1974.

It didn't last very long prior to that point. before Atari lost a bunch of money. I think this one was because of Grand Track 10 being a massive loss for the company. So they needed to generate money quick. So they sold off Atari Japan to Masia Nakamoto, who was their, sort of their local guy. He was the Namco president. And then he was—he was Namco's founder. Yes.

And he would in turn sell their games in Japan to, you know, the various operators there. In Breakout's case, he had to have these machines shipped over to Japan, which was an issue because people really wanted this game. He couldn't provide it to them, so everyone else was making their own clones and doing that. So, you know, we talked about Nintendo doing this S&K. I think Taito had their own clones. Basically, anyone who was working in the arcade space in Japan was cloning breakout. Nakamoto was getting really frustrated. The Yakuza was, you know, sort of leading on him like, hey, you know, if you work with us, we'll take care of your competition on this.

He didn't want to get involved with them either. So he ended up just breaking his contract with Atari and just producing his own breakout machines to sort of catch up to demand. Yeah, and that didn't seem to have any sort of long-term negative effect on that relationship because Namcoe and Atari continue. continued working together for a long, long time, you know, well into the late 80s. So, yeah, I think, hopefully, it seems like Atari kind of understood the prudence of him just being like, you know what? Sorry, guys. I just got to bail. We got to do this.

Sorry. I got to keep on my fingers. You know, if I remember right, Namco, or at least folks involved in Namco did end up getting a share of Atari games in the late 80s. So I'm sure it worked out for them all. Yeah. When Atari, Inc. split up, Namco played a big part in getting Atari games up and running again. And then the folks on the American side bought it away from the Namco group like a year later. I can't remember the exact details. But yeah, Namco played a big part in there. But then, you know, once you had Tingen kind of spin off from Atari or like operated as its shell, they were publishing a lot of Namco games. because they didn't want to work with Nintendo. So I guess it was like, you know, the lesser of two evils in their view or something.

This way they're not, you know, having to pay money to Nintendo for their games. Exactly. And they didn't want to work with the Yakuza. They didn't want to work with Nintendo. They just don't like paying other people money. And I can understand that. And Atari got to, you know, thumb it to Nintendo. So, hey, everyone's aware, except eventually, I guess, Atari.

But yes. So, yeah, you mentioned on here that Nintendo's, first, or not his first home console, but one of its earliest ones was a breakout clone. Yeah, a lot of Japanese companies, kind of, you know, after HomePong came out in 75, started making their own variants of it, their own versions, and selling it in their home market. And Nintendo was definitely part of that. They had their, you know, TV game 6, I think, and then TV Game 15, which was like black and white pong and then color pong.

And then, yeah, they followed up on that. working with Mitsubishi, who actually did the manufacturing and design on these, the hardware design, produced Block Kuzushi, their own take on breakout in 1979. So, you know, direct antecedent to the NES and really kind of one of the last things they did before they had their big, kind of big moment in the international spotlight with Donkey Kong. And if I remember right, I think I've read somewhere that Shigeru Miyamoto did the design. of the shell for this thing. Yeah, he, he redesigned Color TV 15, which originally had this kind of like very sort of functional white design. And he redesigned the shell to be orange and rounded and friendly looking

and have these like really clear labels that, you know, without words, showed you exactly, you know, with like a very simple pictogram, what, what mode you were going to play. And then he continued to design. the hardware shells for their home consoles. I think that's just about everything with breakout, unless you want to talk a bit about this microvision connection as well. Yeah, sure.

I mean, you know, moving back into the U.S. As consoles began to move away from the dedicated console space and into, you know, cartridge-based systems and even to handheld systems, the very first handheld-based portable system, Milton Bradley's Microvision, a lot of those games have a very breakout sort of feel to them. They're like the direct clones of breakout, and then there are just other games. You know, they had like, what, a 16 by 16 pixel resolution or something, some pitiful little resolution. So there's only so much you can do with that. But because

the microvision, like the cassette vision, had like the game logic in the cartridge, but also had the controls built into the cartridge. So every game had its own control system. They could very easily put, you know, like a spinner type control, you know, paddle type control in some of their cartridges to give you some sort of rough kind of analog controls. So that became, you know, sort of the backbone of early handheld gaming. Nintendo with their game and watch line would eventually get around to making a very, very good breakout style game called Spitball Sparky. which was one of the few color game and watch systems, and it was one of the few that had a vertical oriented screen. It's like a long, tall handheld, as opposed to being wide like most

game and watches. So, you know, breakout just echoes throughout video gaming, especially these early years. And there's so many connections to people who would go on to be so influential and so critical for the advancement of video games. So, you know, it's just, you really can't understate what an impact this game had. Well, that's fun, because now we get into the exciting part of the discussion about all of the echoes out from breakout. And there's so many. It's like shouting into a cave. It just keeps going.

So, yeah, I guess the first big one, to bring up his space invaders, which we've talked on briefly when we were talking about how the shooter genre owes its existence to break out in its current form. So,

Nishikato, Tomohiro Nishikato, the original designer of space invaders in a biography about him some years ago, said that breakout was his inspiration for space invaders. He'd seen this game in action, and originally he was just sort of very baffled

why people were really interested in it because he had seen Clean Sweep and he was not impressed with Clean Sweep and then he actually saw people playing it and realized, oh, this game doesn't have to be realistic. It can still be very interesting and fun but be very like esoteric or primitive. So he was working on

developing his first microprocessor-based game which, you know, Taito got interested in. He got interested in after Midway out in the U.S. had licensed his game, Western Gun, and totally remade it with a microprocessor. His original version was all T-T-L. But he saw microprocessors as the future, so he thought, okay, I'll do that with Space Invaders, or the project that became Space Invaders, rather. Was the working title Deadly Sushi?

Is that what he called it? God. I know at one point they called it Space Monster, so there's that. But yeah, so if you look at breakout and you look at Space Invaders, you can kind of start to see the similarities once you realize that connection. So, you know, the paddle became a tank that you could move back and forth with your joystick or buttons depending on your cabinet. The wall became, you know, the enemies that were moving around and shooting back at you.

and they could descend down the screen because you needed something to pressure the player. And the ball was removed entirely and replaced with the ability to shoot back and forth at each other. And then he took the two-wall concept from breakout and expanded that outward into just an endless series of waves that went on as long as players could keep the game going, which was really an innovation at this time because a lot of arcade games were either based on hitting a certain score threshold or just running out a clock. And this was one of the earliest games that said, you know, what if we didn't do either of those things? What if we just let people go until they couldn't go anymore? Yeah, it's interesting how much you can see of breakout in Space Invaders, but also how it kind of twists some of the rules and changes things up.

You know, breakout is very much in the Pong style of a void missing ball for high score type instructions. Whereas here, you know, with the ball's becoming enemy projectiles and your own projectiles, it becomes very asymmetrical because the enemies can shoot a whole lot more missiles at once than you can. You can only have one on the screen at a time, just like with the ball in breakout, but you don't want to hit, you don't want to avoid missing the ball in this. You want to avoid being hit by the missiles. So it changes the nature of the action from kind of positioning yourself in the best spot to return the ball. upward to being very careful to dodge projectiles and keep yourself safe. Yeah, and I do think it's very funny that that sort of concept of what if Space Invaders didn't have these shots, what if you were bouncing a ball around, got revisited with Space Invaders

versus Arkanoid, you know, what, 30-odd, 40 years later? Yeah, that was on what, DSPSP? I think it was a mobile game originally, and now it's on like Switch and such. Maybe it's even more recent than I thought. It's interesting that this thing sort of converged back around on that front. But yeah, Space Invaders, huge hit. You had the Invader Boom in Japan. Taito sold 100,000 units of this game by the end of 78, which, if you consider that breakout was a success, like a monster success at like 15,000 units.

That's just mind-boggling to me. And then they had, I think, I've seen estimates of around 300,000 official and clones of space invaders by September 79. So just a ridiculously popular game in Japan. And those are just Japanese numbers. So I think outside of that country, Midway did the distribution, and they produced 65,000 units, which also pretty big success. But, wow, it just pales in comparison. Yeah, it was huge. I mean, it became really one of the first games, maybe the first game I remember people referencing in pop culture. Like, no one ever talked about Pong or breakout, you know, in media, but people would make references in other like television shows or comic books or whatever to Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

So it kind of, it was really kind of the beginning of video games as a thing that had a mass level of awareness that exceeded just sort of a novelty or an amusement. It became, you know, just part of the lingo, the language. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If I remember, this is the first game that had its own strategy guide, like produced and published. and I don't know that it was a bestseller or anything, but you can still find them in Japanese stores pretty readily. And, of course, the Atari home port of Space Invaders was a massive hit in the U.S.

And that sort of kicked off the U.S. home console gaming fad of the first few years of the 80s. So it's all very cyclical in that sense. All right, so, yeah, space invaders, you know, I was talking earlier about shooters, like shooters descend from space invaders. You, you know, you take the invaders that replace the bricks from breakout and instead of having them march in this very steady rhythmic forward progression, you give them the ability to swoop down, to break formation, to fly at you and attack. And all of a sudden, you've got Galaxian and Gallagher. And, you know, you put wallpaper behind it. So you're moving over

objects. You put, you know, objects on the wallpaper. You've got Zebius. You've got so many shooters that just kind of emerge from space invaders branching out and adding more elements of complexity to it. So, you know, again, there's no direct, like, step one, step two link between breakout and Mushihime-Sama or, you know, Dengen Feveron or something. But the influence is there. You know, without one, there would not have been the other. I find it really funny that you can trace Space Invaders origin back to Pog and not computer space, the shooter that came out before Pong. Yeah, I don't think you could necessarily trace a lot of influences back to computer space.

It was a little, it's, you know, it was a very important game, but also maybe just not quite, the kind of thing that you can say, oh, let's, let's keep evolving this. Yeah, the game's based on computer space. You can very much tell they're based on computer space, like asteroids or something. But back to breakout, you know, the next game I put on this list, because I think it's got its own value here into this discussion as Circus, which is a 1977 Exidy game designed by Edward Valu and Howell Ivy again? Sort of his return to the ball and paddle genre.

And in this game, you have a seesaw that you control, and there's two clowns bouncing off of it, and each bounce gets them a little higher up, and you're trying to pop balloons that are floating by in three columns at the top of the screen. They're constantly moving, so, like, the gaps are constantly shifting. Once you clear one row,

you get a bunch of bonus points. If you clear the top row, you get an extra life. The game has a bit of a momentum and gravity to it that you don't really see in most of the other breakout versions. It did all right domestically. It sold 7,000 units in 78.

Other companies licensed it out or just straight cloned it. It's a little hard to tell at this point. But you got stuff like, Midway's Clowns. That was pretty popular. And Intaito did a Japanese version called Acrobat, which did very well for the company in Japan. And the main reason I bring this up is that Exidy claims this is the first coin-up video game that generated its own music without using an external device like an eight-track player or something along those lines. So all of the little medleys and sound effects are in the game. And, you know, those were very immortalized by YMO, Yellow Magic Orchestra.

There's a track, I can't remember what it's called, it's like theme from circus or something like that, and it takes the music from this game and kind of turns it into, you know, a croft work style techno piece or electronica, you know, EDM almost. Yeah, and the, I think the opening song to this game, which just features very prominently in that piece. Oh, yeah. Computer game theme from Circus is what it's called. And, you know, because the YMO members went on to start publishing video game soundtrack albums in the 80s, you could look to Circus as sort of the inspirational game for the entire video game soundtrack realm, if you will. And I think you're underselling the game itself a little bit, too, because it's very interesting. You know, it's, yeah, it's got that breakout invaders kind of thing to it, but it's got these little stick figure guys who are flopping around. You know, you launch them into the air and you're trying to catch them on your, your seesaw and launch them, you know, back up again. And if you miss, then they splatter on the ground. It's not graphic or anything, but, you know, Exidy was the company behind Death Race. So, and did they, were they the ones who? made a chiller or was that someone else that was them eventually they did do chiller they just they just loved killing guys that was just like that that was their claim that their contribution to video game history uh video game soundtracks and killing guys killing little hapless guys but the way they flail as you launch them into the air and you know if they missed the ball and they are the the balloons and they hit the platforms on the edge of the screen they just kind of like flop down uh it's it's it's very comical and

and kind of horrible, but, you know, because they're stick figures, you don't really think too much about, like, oh, my God, he just broke his spine and he's dead. Oh, great. Oh, what a terrible way to die. It's just, it's just funny. It's cute. Yeah, the animation in this game is really fun. It's one of my favorite parts about it. And, of course, it was ported to everything like breakout was, so you can find clowns all over the place. And, you know, what kind of clown is better than a dead clown? now that's that's apparently the modern view of clowns so that brings us background to Atari they did their sort of sequel to breakout called Super Breakout and that was microprocessor based programmed by Edlog

and released around September 1978 and according to Log this came from you know Nolan Bushnell musing on what sort of variations they could do with the breakout premise. And, you know, he heard about this from one of his fellow co-workers,

Owen Rubin. And despite the fact that log was already working on a game called DirtBike, he figured, what the, hey, I have enough spare time. I can take up a second project. Why not? So he started working on this in his spare time using the DirtBike hardware, which was 6502-based. He had to program breakout from scratch because the original game was, you know,

T.TL.L. and from there he had to put together these different variants based on what Bushnell was talking about. They ended up with five different ones that he'd come up with. Only three of them got used in the final version. Their original plan was to put each of these into their own separate distinct cabinet and over time they just got winnowed down until they just had one with three versions of the game. That's probably the way to go.

Sometimes it's not good to get too granular. Yeah. in this case, because, you know, they're all pretty good, but I don't know if they were all good enough to make money on their own. Yeah. So the three final ones that they worked with were a progressive breakout where the

ball, or the walls, the wall starts at the top of the screen, and then it slowly starts making its way down. And then a new wall will spawn in behind it after, you know, a couple of gaps. Then you have cavity breakout, which has two holes in the wall,

with these balls bouncing around in them. And if you free those, then you just have an extra ball that you can use to try and get some bonus points with. And then there's double breakout, which you have two paddles stacked on each other, and there's two balls in play.

And these were all, these all tested well based on the documentation of the strong. They had two final concepts that didn't make it in the final game. One of one was Canyon Breakout, which had a hole in the middle of the wall, that you could work your ball up through and hit the stuff at the top. So I think this is sort of the,

I guess you could consider this sort of the first version of breakout that tried to do something interesting with the wall besides just having it there. It also focused tested well, but I'm assuming they had to cut something for, you know, space. And then the other one that they came up with was vertical breakout where as you destroy bricks, the ones above it would fall down and fill the gaps.

That one seemed to have been dropped before. it even made it to focus testing. So I think maybe it just wasn't very fun. Could be. It sounds like kind of a starting point for Tetris, but without the good things about Tetris that make it so appealing. Yeah.

So this ended up, they produced about 4,000 units of this. It's enough for Atari to have called it a success. They ported it to their computers. They ported it to the 2,600 and the 5200, where it was a pack-in title. I think really the big interesting thing here, is that this was one of their

Sears exclusive games for the VCS, but only time limited. It was sort of a timed exclusive, which... Was it the first timed exclusive? My God. I think it is, actually. So Sears got this in September 81, or thereabouts,

and then Atari started publishing it more broadly in January. But yeah, timed exclusive, super breakout. Huh, a thing like that. You know. All right, so that's, um, that was the last of the official breakout All right, so that was the last of the official breakout games for a long time, correct?

Yes, as far as I'm aware. All right. I mean, you know, eventually Atari would be sold off, shuffled around, and at some point, Hasbro Interactive owned them or their rights or something. So you got like breakout and Pong for the PlayStation. I want to say there was a breakout remake. I know there was definitely Pong, the next level. There's a breakout 2000 for the Jaguar, which is...

Of course there was. And it was trippy and had llamas in it, right? Strangely, not as trippy as you'd expect. Because it wasn't done by Jeff Minter. No, it's sort of like a behind-the-paddle sort of view. And it's the ball, like the wall is up at the top. you're still breaking it, but yeah, it's okay. It's not great. But yeah, there's plenty of other companies doing a breakout style stuff, though. Yeah, the big one in the late 70s was definitely

Namco. Before, before Galaxian came along, we've talked about this in our Namco overview episodes, but, you know, before Galaxian really hit it big, Namco was kind of flailing around, trying to figure things out. And so you've got the, I guess you're calling it the trilogy of Gibi, Bombi, and QDQ, which are very much the sort of the, to me, they're kind of the definitive paddle pinball games, as you call them. I would agree with that. They definitely take elements from both, and they do a great job with them. So these were designed by Toru Iwatani before he did Pac-Man. and the programming assistance was from Shigeichi Ishimura.

When I understand, Gibi was one of the Namco's first games that they developed entirely in-house, and yeah, they mashed up elements of both breakout and pinball. As far as I'm aware, they weren't pulling from a TV flipper or any of those things, but the same basic source material, which was pinball machines. Yeah, so in this one, instead of having just the breakout wall at the top, you've got it kind of lining the entire screen and you've got, you know, obstacles and barriers and things like that in the middle of the screen. So you're trying to kind of angle your shots to hit the things around the edges.

Yeah, and you've got like the sort of scoring progression that you see in pinball games. That's sort of echoed in all three of these. You do certain things and suddenly you get multipliers or targets are worth more points, that sort of thing. It's a very clever design. Yeah, I mean, they seem fun. Have these been ported to, like, Namco Museum? I feel like one of them was on the very early PlayStation Namco Museum, but I could be wrong.

So the Japanese version of Namco Museum Volume 2 has QDQ and as a hidden game, Bombie. Okay. And if you have the volume controller, which is sort of a PlayStation paddle controller, you can play it with these. and sort of get the true QDQ experience, if you will. And I think they put QDQ on the Wii Namco Museum collections as well. I don't know how well that one works. I'm assuming it's fine because it's using motion controls or something, but never tried it. Yeah, that's a big challenge with bringing games like this back is the fact that they're,

generally, they were designed for analog spinners. not always like breakout was not if I'm not mistaken right it was just breakout used a spinner oh did it okay all right well there you go I've never actually seen a breakout arcade cabinet so it's it's all mysterious to me but yeah like um you just don't see a lot of paddle controllers anymore and that was you we've talked about this with tito about how a big part of their affection for arcanoid shines through in the fact that they've produced uh you know analog paddles that go with other systems. So you had the Vouse controller for the NES, and you had the slot two paddle controller for the Nintendo DS, and then you have most recently the Taito Egret Mini 2, Egret 2 mini, and that has an

optional paddle spinner that can also play stuff like Camel Tree. But, you know, those are very unusual, and there's not a lot of demand for that style of controller, so you just don't see it very often. I think the only other one that comes to mind, I'm sure there are some others, but the one that comes to mind is Woody Pop for Sega Mark 3, which came with a paddle controller. And it was a kind of a breakout style game. And I believe you could use that paddle controller for Alex Kidd BMX Trials, which also never came to the US because who wants to play Alex Kid riding a bike?

You know, I think I played that at a convention once, and it was surprisingly okay. I have them both with the controllers, so I'll get to them eventually when I cover some Mark 3 stuff with my videos, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised, I guess. Maybe we can revisit this topic later when I come back and say, hey, we need to talk about how Alex Kid BMX trial is a revolutionary follow-up to break out, but probably not. And I think that will bring us to the big breakout. inspired game here. Yes, Arkanoid. We've talked about this a lot on some recent Taito episodes, but please, by all

means, regales, because it's such a good game, crazy hard, but very, very, like, just such a great mid-80s contemporary take on breakout that really says, you know, let's keep it true to the original spirit of the thing, but let's not be afraid to throw new stuff in. Yeah, so this is a version of breakout, more or less, except they do interesting things with the brick layouts, so they're not afraid to make art out of their bricks, their brick patterns, or just... There are space invaders levels where the bricks look like invaders, so it just brings everything full circle, really. Or just to set it up so that there's invincible tiles you can't break, so you have to find ways to get a... around them to, you know, destroy the bricks behind them. There's power-ups, so you can extend the length of your paddle.

You can spawn extra balls. You can get a laser that is a godsend because this game is stupid hard. Yeah, the laser you can use to destroy anything except gold bricks. You have like the standard colored bricks. You have silver bricks that can be destroyed with, I think, three hits. And then you have gold bricks that just cannot be destroyed, as you mentioned. and the laser can, you know, it basically hits as hard as the ball. So while you're, you know, bouncing the ball around, you can also sit there just like pounding the fire button to clear out

the screen, which sounds like, oh, wow, you just broke the game. But no, this, as you said, this game is really hard. And the ball is flying around really fast. And you really just have to focus on the ball the entire time. So like if you're shooting, you're not really thinking, hey, I'm aiming for this thing. You're just automatically firing and not really paying attention to what's happening so you don't miss the ball. Yep, pretty much. That's why I'm never any good at it. And there's enemies that'll spawn to, and I think there's a final boss, although I've never seen it in my entire life.

One interesting thing is that Atari games sued Taito and its American distributor for this ROMStar over its similarities to breakout. As far as I can tell, they probably settled out of court because there's no public judgment on the case other than affirming that Atari could indeed have a copyright on the breakout concept. But I'm assuming it's settled because there's a bunch of Arkenoid sequels. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like this would be a look and feel case that would be really hard to successfully litigate. just, you know, there were so many breakout clones. I feel like NAMCO could have just gone, or Taito could have just gone in and said, like, hey, you know,

people have been making breakout style games for so long. We didn't call it breakout. Like, we didn't do anything that infringes on trademark. So at this point, the, the cows are out of the barn, basically. But I don't know, though. But generally, look and feel lawsuits don't really go much of anywhere. my recollection. Yeah.

I don't know where that particular argument was at around 87, 88. I think I'd seen that it had gone in both directions by that point, so Atari probably felt they could make a pretty good case there. But yeah, since there's no public judgment on how that lawsuit went, I could only assume they settled and just left that question for another day. Or, you know, maybe it's, maybe I'm wrong in the... That information is just not online. Who knows.

But Arkenoid got ported to pretty much everything. This game was popular. You could find it on the Famicom and NES. Like you said, it had its own distinct paddle controller for it. It's on a bunch of old computer systems that were available at the time, like the Commodore 64, the Zetex Spectrum, the Amiga, the Apple 2, the Apple 2, GS, the Atari 8-bit line. I think the Atari ST, just anything that had a presence on the market that they could cram arcanoid onto seem to have arcanoid.

And then there's a, I guess, an arcanoid successor that you've added here to the notes that I'd never really paid attention to. It's on the IGRA 2 mini paddle expansion, it says, but I did not actually try it out yet. Poochie carrot. Yes, this is a very... I just assumed it had something to do with digicarrant, so that's my mistake. It's a really strange game. I had never really heard of it until I got to try it on the EGrit 2.

So you know how a lot of puzzle games of that era you had each player having their own playfield and you were sending stuff at your opponent like Puyo Puyo or Puzzle. This is sort of that, but it's breakout style. So you each have your own paddle and your own bricks

and the bricks spawned in different patterns based on the character. and you can drop multiple bricks at once if you catch whatever the connecting bricks are to whatever's above them and doing that will force more things to spawn on the opponent's side if you miss the ball

it'll bring the whole thing down a level so it's a really interesting game I don't know that it went anywhere I don't know if it's popular as a multiplayer game but it's cool I'll give it that I will take your word for it Maybe at some point I will sit down and actually try it for myself.

But yeah, at the very end of this, I put just together a little quick list of a few other games that owe, oh, not so much owe their existence to breakout, but are, you know, games that kind of kept that spirit alive beyond the point that the breakout series itself. was viable. And, you know, there's some interesting little connections and combinations and tangents here, like Nintendo's pinball. You know, it's a pinball game. And it is one of the first pinball video games that did not play like breakout. But they kept that spirit in there by having a bonus mode, a bonus screen. So in addition to the two screens of the pinball table, there is a kind of an extra screen you can go to. And when you go there, you have Mario, running around, holding a paddle over his head as a ball bounces around, and you're trying to save Pauline from some horrible fate or whatever by basically playing breakout.

So it's funny that they made this pinball game that finally is its own thing. It's pinball. And at the same time, they were like, but also, we've got that breakout here that you like, kids, okay? You're going to love it. Another interesting one is Quarth, which is not really a breakout game per se, but it's, it feels very breakout inspired. It's a shooter by Konami, but it's also a puzzle game, and you're basically trying to clear away blocks, like, not just like individual squares, but almost Tetris-shaped blocks that are descending down the screen by creating units, by firing other blocks up. at them. So it's, um, like, it's not, it's not breakout. It's not Tetris. It's not a shooter,

but it just kind of touches on all these things at once. It's, um, it was, I think, designed by one of the founders of treasure. So maybe that explains why it's so kind of interesting and unusual and a little oblique, uh, because that's just how he was. Checks out. Uh, you have, um, you know, when Nintendo launched the Game Boy, they launched it with alleyway, which is a straight-up breakout game. It has basically all the different variants of breakout in there. You've got just the standard, you know, there's a row, there are several rows of bricks at the top of the screen, break them all. There are modes or levels where the bricks descend at you and, you know, more bricks come in behind them, like super breakout. And then

there are some bonus stages where it's, oh, you know, this is what's like clean sweep. The bonus stages of Alliway, where you have blocks in the shape of, you know, like Mario characters and Gumbas and stuff, and you're bouncing the ball through them. And instead of, you know, bouncing it off the walls, but instead of reflecting off the blocks that are forming the shapes in the stage, they just pass through it. And your goal in that stage is to clear away all the bricks. So yes, that was what I was trying to think of, where I had seen the clean sweep concept before. So Allieway really I need to revisit my write-up on that, because now I'm really appreciating just how much history it encompassed and incorporated into itself in this fairly simple-looking, you know, portable breakout clone on Game Boy. Helly way with the deep cuts out there.

You put something called Off the Wall. Is that a Michael Jackson license game? No, it's a very late era 2,600 game. I think he came out in 88 or 89, and it's a breakout clone. For whatever reason, it does not use the paddle, but it does pull some things from Arkanoid, like there's power-ups, there's like a dragon at the top of the screen that you're trying to whack with the ball, so you want to get it past the wall and all that. It's very strange game. I don't know that's as good as Breakout, because it's not using a paddle, but it's interesting. And what about Shatter?

What's that? Oh, boy. Shatter is a, it's an indie game that came out originally on PS3. and eventually got ported to steam as well. And this is a real expansion of that sort of breakout arcanoid formula. So you have, like, different levels. You have different layouts to the screen. There's, like, gravity effects that can impact the ball on some stages, some, like, weird camera effects.

It's a really cool game. I never fully finished it, but I remember when it first came out, a friend of mine was just obsessed with this game. And it's just, yeah, it's a really good high score chasing a style game. You can also just play through it. But yeah, very neat game. It's worth checking out. I would also say that there was a period between like 1999 and 2010, 2011, where breakout was just a thing, you know, especially under the Japanese title Block Kazushi.

It was just everywhere on PlayStation 1. on PlayStation 2 and on DS, with the, with the consoles, it tended to show up as simple series games, the, you know, the kind of the budget line, uh, quick release type games made by D3 and whoever else. And, um, they, they just, they made a lot of them. A lot of them didn't make it here, but there were, there were a ton of them. And you'd buy them for like, you know, 2,000 yen, 20 bucks or 15 bucks at the moment. Um, and that was, uh, just like a, uh, just like a, thing that happened a lot. And then on DS, there were so many breakout clones, break them all, nervous brickdown, absolute brickbuster, and then quite a few that didn't come to the US. And I guess the idea there was maybe you could use the Arcanoid paddle controller, you know, that existed. So let's lean on that. But also just, you know, use the stylus to control the paddle and have that analog sensation. So that was kind of the last big hurrah for for the breakout style was, you know, the, the analog touchscreen of the, the DS.

Yeah. I suppose there's probably a lot of these games on mobile, but, you know, they're probably also all stuffed with ads and, like, you know, weird gotcha elements and, you know, monetization. Like, King probably has one that's extremely predatory. And anytime it's, like, very candy-colored and fun and energetic and entices you to play, but then it's a little badly designed to deliberately make you burn through all your tokens and have to pay microtransactions. And there's weird ads on the side for these bizarre games about pregnant girls.

Like, it's just, that's why I don't pay attention to the mobile space. For those of you who enjoy that sort of thing, God bless, I just can't deal with it. But I'm sure that stuff is out there because, you know, touchscreens are a great, they're a great way to kind of approximate to the best of your ability. a spinner controller. I would say it's more fun to play a paddle spinner-style game with touch controls than it is to play, you know, approximate like D-pad controls.

Oh, yeah. In fact, I think Arcanoid, I think Space Invaders versus Arcanoid, when they brought it to Switch, does use the touchscreen on the Switch. Yeah, I looked that up. That was 2017. I had no idea it was that recent.

I felt like it was a much older game, but it was just, you know, it goes back to the whole Arkanoi DS Space Invaders extreme thing that started in like 2007, 2008 on PSP and DS. And they just kept iterating on it until they got to this

this game that was on neither of those systems because they no longer existed. And has all sorts of weird Taito in jokes and references. I'm looking at the Wikipedia description just to check the date. And there's this whole sidebar of all these cameos

and things like that. Like, hey, there's chack and pop all right good times that's who the kids love they love chack and pop love chackin uh and then finally just to wrap up i do want to mention not as like an actual breakout variant. But I kind of feel like puzzle games, where you have objects of the top descending, are the alternate history of the evolution of breakdown. If breakdown hadn't become space invaders, hadn't become Galaxian, hadn't become Zevius, hadn't become, you know, Dotompachi, they might have become puzzle bobble and magical drop. Because the idea is kind of the same. You have this inexorable wall of things descending at you.

and you're shooting stuff back up. But instead of just, you know, breaking objects with physical impact, you're trying to use chaining mechanics and colors to clear things away. And, you know, they add in elements like that, you know, the vertical

breakout thing you mentioned where you clear away a block and things fall. That's entirely the premise of puzzle bubble. If you hit the right blocks and clear those away or bubbles, then you'll clear out an entire chunk of the screen. So it's all about kind of like very carefully aiming and making use of the reflection

physics and that sort of thing. So yeah, I couldn't actually argue that magical drop is, you know, super breakout three. But it's definitely a without whom kind of game. Like, it definitely owes its existence to break out. And it's like that that breakout spirit is still kind of there. Yeah. Puzzle particularly feels like something that they, you know, looked at what they'd done with Arkanoid and we're thinking, well, how can we build on that without needing a paddle? How can we get Bub and Bob in here? How can we make Archenoid into a bubble bubble spin-off?

And there you go. They did it. They succeeded. Anyway, the point is that Breakout is a very important video game, a foundational video game that has largely been forgotten in this day and age, but its influence is just all over the place. You don't have to look hard to find it. Yeah.

And hey, this gave us an opportunity to even bring up Ramtech on a podcast. That's always a plus. This might have been the first time I've ever heard of Ramtech, actually. It's definitely the first time they've been mentioned on Retronauts. You know, they did a lot of really cool stuff before they completely imploded and a bunch of their people left for Exidy. Ain't that always the case? Mm-hmm. All right.

Well, that wraps it up for episode 479 of Retronauts. I can't believe it took us this many episodes to talk about breakout. But here we are. We've talked about it. And now you, the listener, understand just how much of your life has been shaped by this little Atari game with the paddle and the ball, not pong, breakout. So, Kevin, thank you very much for your time and expertise and pulling together all these great notes and just filling us, filling our brains with an hour and a half of really, really substantial video game history. you happy to do it happy to be here happy to talk breakout well we'll uh we'll talk pinball at some point and we can mention breakout then as well uh so that's it for this episode thank you everyone

for listening hope you enjoyed learning about breakout and uh i hope we surprised you by how much we could say about breakout i wasn't sure this episode is going to be 30 minutes or an hour in 30 minutes, but we hit the ladder. So there you go. There's a lot to say about breakout. History. It's important. Who do? Love it. So if you enjoy video game history, and clearly you do, you're listening to this podcast, you can support these endeavors to chronicle video game history by going to Patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribing to the show for three bucks a month. You can listen to every episode like this that comes out on a Monday on the public feed a week early. And on top of that, you get it with better episode audio quality and no ad,

advertisements or cross-promotions. So it's a higher fidelity experience. And that's very enticing. For $5 a month, you also get bonus patron-exclusive episodes every other Friday, bonus patron-exclusive columns every weekend with little mini podcasts, and patron-exclusive Discord access. So that's a whole bundle of things for an extra two bucks. You could buy a venty chai spice latte with soy milk, and an extra shot, but instead of doing that, you could just subscribe to Retronauts at patreon.com slash Retronauts. I vote for the

Retronaut's side, but hey, that's just me. Anyway, Kevin, where can we find you on the internet and so forth? You can find me on YouTube at Atari Archive. I'm also on Twitter at Ubersaurus, and I have a Patreon that funds

my videos and possibly some more stuff on the Intellivision. Apparently, that's something people really like. And that's under patreon.com slash Atari Archive. So, yeah, thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, it was great having you on and hearing all your deep wisdom.

Kevin didn't mention, although I did earlier on, that he's putting together a book version of Atari Archive that will be published through Press Run books. Hopefully early next year, it looks good, I can say, because I am doing the layouts but the text is even better very informative if you liked

what Kevin had to say about breakout imagine that being said about like 20 other Atari 2,600 games there's a lot of history there so look for that at limited rungames.com

early next year I believe and in the meantime you can find me Jeremy Parrish doing other stuff like that at limited run games you can find me oh here on Retronauts of course you can find me on Twitter

as GameSpite and you can find me on YouTube doing my own chronology stuff, but with boring NES and Sega games, God, nothing really deep and historical like Atari, but you know, you make do with what you can. And that's supported by Patreon. You can find all those information there by going to YouTube and looking for me, Jeremy Parrish. And that's it. That's all we're saying about breakout. So now we've got to get out of here before that wall descends and crushes us. Good night. Bye bye. I'm going to be able to be.

Thank you.