Ball and paddle
Ball and paddle is a genre of video game where players control paddles which are used to bounce balls around. A similar genre which involves catching of ricocheting objects is the catcher.
Contents
Personal
Although my family had an Atari 2600 in the mid-1980s with dozens of games and paddle controllers, we didn't actually own any ball and paddle games for it. It wasn't until the late-1980s that I learned about Arkanoid, but I couldn't find it for the NES, so I had to be content to watch people play it in the arcade. The one time I did finally get a chance to play it, I very quickly got a game over. I remember playing Super Breakout on the Atari 2600 long after it was obsolete and, even after several tries, not being able to finish the first level. I had programmed a few Pong clones in QuickBASIC in 1996 and even Visual Basic in 1999 since they're easy to make. Some time in the early 1990s, my mother got a shareware copy of Moraff's Super Blast, and, I liked it enough to buy it as part of a Moraffware collection. A friend of mine lent me a copy of Funpack in 1995 which included a game called Block Breaker. I programmed a similar game from Black Art of Visual Basic Game Programming in the late 1990s. I finally got a chance to play Arkanoid on the NES in the late 1990s thanks to an emulator. Around 1999 or so, I bought a used copy of Arkanoid: Doh It Again for the SNES.
For the many years I've played ball and paddle games, I've never really developed a love for any of them because they all get boring very quickly. There's just only so much you can do with the concept, so game play is mostly mindless reaction.
History
The ball and paddle genre began in 1958 with William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two, but it was commercialized in 1972 with several games for the Odyssey like Table Tennis, and a few months later with Pong in the arcade. The genre exploded in the mid-to-late 1970s with over 1,000 Pong clones and variants thanks to Atari figuring out how to put Pong on a single chip. Ramtek expanded into the block-breaker genre with Clean Sweep in May 1974 and Knockout September 1974. Former Atari engineers created Fun Games and released "Bust Out" in November 1975 in Take Seven, which was a sideways version of Breakout before Atari could finally get Breakout to market, in April 1976. The genre saw a huge boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a few standouts like Super Breakout and Arkanoid. Ball and paddle games have seen continuous development since then, but, by the 1990s, they had been mostly relegated to low-budget games released by independent publishers.
Games
This is a list of ball and paddle games that are important to me, for all ball and paddle games, see the category.
| Title | Released | Developer |
|---|---|---|
| Alleyway | 1989-04-21 | Intelligent Systems, Nintendo |
| Arkanoid | 1986-04-26 | Taito |
| Arkanoid: Doh It Again | 1997-01-15 | Taito |
| Block Breaker | 1993-??-?? | WayForward Technologies |
| Moraff's Super Blast | 1990-12-04 | Moraffware |
| Super Breakout | 1978-09-?? | Atari |
| Wizorb | 2011-09-28 | Tribute Games |
Links
- mobygames.com/game-group/pong-variants - MobyGames - Pong variants.
- mobygames.com/game-group/breakout-variants - MobyGames - Breakout variants.
