Playing games within video games: Breakout

After achieving a certain level of mastery over a video game, I often find myself making up new challenges to keep things interesting. I’m not alone. Perhaps the most infamous modern example is the dude who discovered he could pass an entire Call of Duty mission without firing a single shot.

So I asked some people to share the challenges they’ve made up. Here’s the first of those responses.

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This dates back to the 1970’s. I was workng at Macy’s selling cameras and calculators, and our department (rather than the toy department Macy’s used to have) sold the first wave of home video games.

Pong! In your own home! On your own television! Only $80!

A year or two after Pong, but before its cartridge-based VCS 2600, Atari marketed a Video Pinball unit with three or four game choices built in. One of the games was Breakout.

The idea was to control a Pong-like paddle at the bottom of the screen to direct a ball up against a layered ceiling of bricks and knock as many out as possible before missing the ball for the third time. An obvious strategy was to break out a hole in all the layers at one end of the wall, then let the ball bounce back and forth between the top of the screen and the upper side of the wall, thus busting multiple bricks at each go. Knocking out all the bricks on a screen, where bricks in each layer had varying values, would earn 448 points, which is a perfectly logical number.

As I recall, once that was done, you’d be given a second go at it, only with a smaller paddle. I had enough free time to become particularly adept at the game. It got to the point where merely scoring the maximum of 896 points was routine, so I gave myself the challenge of completely clearing both screens of bricks with just one ball.

When that got too easy, I found myself physically pirouetting in place while the ball was in play, just to add to the hand-eye coordination challenge. Bounce the ball off the paddle. Spin. Find the ball and bounce it again.

(Image cc-licensed: "Super Breakout (1978)" by Tilemahos Efthimiadis)