The history of Arkanoid and brick breaker games

From Pong to a wall of bricks

Brick breakers grew out of the very first video game hit. Atari's Pong, released in 1972, was a game of table tennis for two players: each moved a paddle up and down and bounced a ball past the other. It was simple, and it showed that a paddle and a ball could keep people playing for a long time.

The next idea was to turn Pong into a game for one player. Instead of an opponent, the ball would face a wall that the player had to knock down, piece by piece.

Breakout, 1976

Atari released Breakout as an arcade game in 1976. The player turned a knob to move a paddle along the bottom of the screen and bounced a ball into several rows of bricks at the top. Every brick the ball touched disappeared, and the goal was to clear the wall without letting the ball get past the paddle.

Breakout is often remembered for the people who worked on it. The game was conceived at Atari by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, and an early version of its hardware was built by Steve Wozniak together with Steve Jobs, shortly before the two of them founded Apple. The arcade cabinet used a black-and-white screen with strips of colored film over it, so the rows of bricks appeared in different colors.

The rules of Breakout already contained much of what still defines the genre: the angle of the ball depends on where it hits the paddle, the ball gets faster as the game goes on, and breaking through the wall to the space behind it lets the ball bounce around the top of the screen on its own. Atari followed it with Super Breakout in 1978, and Breakout was also released for the Atari 2600 home console.

Arkanoid, 1986

Ten years after Breakout, the Japanese company Taito released Arkanoid in arcades in 1986. The basic game was the same: a paddle, a ball and a wall of bricks. What Taito added changed the genre for good.

• Power-up capsules

  Some bricks released a capsule when they broke. Catching it with the paddle gave an effect, such as a longer paddle, a slower ball, a ball that stuck to the paddle, several balls at once or a laser.

• Different bricks

  Next to ordinary colored bricks there were silver bricks that needed several hits and gold bricks that could not be broken at all.

• Designed levels

  Instead of one wall that came back again and again, each round had its own layout of bricks, from simple stripes to shapes and mazes.

• Enemies and a boss

  Small enemies floated into the playfield and knocked the ball off course, and the last round ended with a boss fight.

The arcade version was played with a spinning dial that gave fine control over the paddle. Arkanoid was a big success in arcades, and over the next years it was converted for many home systems of the time, among them the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the Commodore 64, MSX computers, the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES version was sold with its own dial controller, so players could steer the paddle the way they did in the arcade.

Sequels and later games

Taito returned to the series many times. The best known titles include:

• Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh (arcade, 1987), the direct sequel, with new rounds and new capsules.
• Arkanoid Returns (arcade, 1997), a new version with updated graphics that was later also released for the PlayStation.
• Arkanoid DS, a version for Nintendo's two-screen handheld.
• Arkanoid vs Space Invaders for phones, a crossover between Arkanoid and Taito's other famous arcade game.
• Arkanoid – Eternal Battle (2022) for consoles and PC, with a classic campaign and an online battle mode in which many players compete at the same time.

Taito, which owns the Arkanoid name, has been part of the Square Enix group since 2005.

The genre after Arkanoid

Arkanoid inspired a long line of brick breakers on home computers, consoles and later the PC, many of them made by small teams and hobby programmers. Most of them kept the building blocks that Arkanoid had made popular: capsules with power-ups, bricks that need several hits, bricks that cannot be broken, and hand-made levels. In some countries, for example in Russia and its neighbors, "Arkanoid" became the everyday word for any game of this kind, much as "Breakout" did in others.

Later games added their own twists. Some let the ball explode or pass through bricks, some made the bricks move, and many included a level editor so players could design and share their own walls. On phones, a related style of game became popular in which you aim a stream of balls at blocks with numbers on them instead of moving a paddle.

Web browsers brought the genre to a new audience, because a brick breaker needs nothing more than a mouse or a finger and a few minutes of time.

Our game and the classics

The game on Arkanoid.org is our own brick breaker, written from scratch. It follows the ideas that the genre has shared for decades: a paddle, a ball, a wall of different bricks and capsules to catch. Its levels, graphics, sounds, power-ups and boss are our own, and we do not use any material from Taito's games. Arkanoid is a trademark of Taito Corporation; we are not affiliated with or endorsed by Taito or Square Enix.

Some of our power-ups are classics of the genre, such as a wider paddle, a laser and extra balls; others, such as the Fireball and the Shield, are our own. The power-ups and bricks guide describes them all, and the campaign is ready to play.

To read more about the classics, see the Wikipedia articles on Breakout and Arkanoid.