Block breaker

Arkanoid is one of the most popular block breaker games.

Block breaker is a genre of video game where players are trying to break blocks, typically by maneuvering a paddle to bounce a ball at them. They are a subset of the ball and paddle genre.

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 block breaker games for it. It wasn't until the late-1980s that I learned about Arkanoid, but I couldn't find it for my 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 attempted to make block breaker games in QuickBASIC in the 1990s, but I got bored with them pretty quickly and gave up before I got too far into them. 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 following the instructions in 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, but found it far too difficult. Around 1999 or so, I bought a used copy of Arkanoid: Doh It Again for the SNES. I was briefly re-interested in the genre because of Wizorb, but it didn't last.

For the many years I've played many different block breaker 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

Block breaker games evolved out of ball and paddle games thanks to developers at Ramtek who created Clean Sweep (May, 1974) and Knockout (September 1974). Former Atari engineers formed Fun Games and released Take Seven in 1975 which included a game called "Bust Out," a sideways version of Breakout, the idea of which was probably "borrowed" from Atari before they left. Atari finally got Breakout to market in April 1976 and it greatly popularized the genre. The genre saw a huge boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a few standouts like Super Breakout and Arkanoid. block breaker 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 block breaker games that are important to me, for all block breaker 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/breakout-variants - MobyGames - Breakout variants.