Breakout took the bat and ball of Pong and gave the player a wall to knock down instead of an opponent. Eight rows of bricks sat across the top of the screen, and every brick the ball touched disappeared. It was a hit for Atari in 1976, and it later gave Tomohiro Nishikado the idea that became Space Invaders. What makes it unusual is the people who built it. Its prototype came from Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer who did not work for Atari, in four days and nights, for his friend Steve Jobs, who did. Neither of them had yet started Apple. How many chips Wozniak used, and how much Atari paid for them, depends on who is telling the story.
Fast facts
- Maker: Atari, arcade release in 1976 (April, according to Retro Gamer).
- Idea: credited to Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow.
- Prototype: Steve Wozniak, brought in by Steve Jobs; built in four days.
- Production design: Gary Waters of Cyan Engineering, Atari’s engineering firm in Grass Valley, California.
- Hardware: logic chips only, with no microprocessor; the production board used about 100 chips.
- Control: a knob that moved the bat left and right, like a paddle controller.
- Home version: Atari 2600 cartridge, played with paddles.
- Sequel: Super Breakout (1978), by Ed Logg.
From racquetball to a wall of bricks
Steve Bristow had designed games for Kee Games, Atari’s nominally separate sister company, and came back to Atari as its vice-president of engineering. Retro Gamer’s history of the game says that he and Bushnell were looking for a new idea when they settled on racquetball, a sport that had boomed in the 1970s fitness craze. Hitting a ball against a wall might soon become boring, so they gave the player something to destroy: a wall of bricks that could be knocked down completely. The flyer and cabinet art turned the idea into a prison break, though the racquetball theme came back on the box of the Atari 2600 version.
Atari’s own engineers did not want the job. Bushnell told Retro Gamer in 2005 that they “wanted to create driving and flying games since they were engineers”, and “nobody would volunteer for it”. It went instead to Steve Jobs, then a technician at Atari with little engineering experience. Retro Gamer says Bushnell and Al Alcorn suspected he would bring in Wozniak, whom they had already met. Jobs had taken Wozniak to Atari to show off a home Pong he had built with very few chips, and Alcorn had offered him a job, which Wozniak turned down to stay at Hewlett-Packard.
Four days, and several versions of the story
Everyone agrees on the outline: Atari wanted a design with as few chips as possible, Wozniak built it in four days, and Jobs dealt with Atari. The details differ from account to account.
Steve Bristow, 1982. Talking to Video Games magazine, Bristow did not mention Wozniak. Breakout, he said, was designed by “this non-degreed engineer, but sharp kid from Palo Alto… named Steve Jobs”. The magazine explained that Bushnell would describe a game and name the number of chips he wanted used, and pay a $100 bonus for every chip saved. “I think he brought it down from 80 to 30 ICs,” Bristow said.
Steve Wozniak, 1984. In an interview with BYTE, Wozniak gave his own terms: “if we could design a hardware Breakout in under 50 chips, we’d get 700 bucks; and if it was under 40 chips, we’d get $1000.” He had four days “because Steve had to catch an airplane to Oregon”. His first design used 42 chips and the working version 44, and by then they were too tired to cut it further, “so we only got 700 bucks for it.”
David Sheff, 1993. In his book Game Over, Sheff wrote that Bushnell offered Jobs “a bonus of $100 for every chip he was able to eliminate”, and that “Jobs made himself $5,000”.
Al Alcorn, 2013. Alcorn told Retro Gamer that he had not known the game was being built, and was surprised Jobs had done it “since he wasn’t an engineer. I soon found out that Woz did it.” In his memory the design had “about 20 chips”.
Wozniak’s share. Retro Gamer reported that Jobs told Wozniak Atari was paying $700, to be split between them, and paid him $350, and that Wozniak learned years later of a bonus of $5,000. Wozniak spoke about it himself in a BBC documentary in 2011. He said he had cried “quite a bit when I read that in a book”, and that “I just wish he had been honest.” Retro Gamer adds that he said he would gladly have given Jobs the money if Jobs had told him he needed it.
The accounts cannot all be right. The chip count ranges from about 20 to 44, and the money from $700 to $5,000. What they share is the arrangement: a bonus for every chip saved, and Wozniak doing the designing.
Built from chips, not a program
Breakout had no processor and no program. Like Pong, it was a circuit made of logic chips, and the ball, the bat and the bricks were all produced by the wiring. Wozniak’s board was too clever to manufacture. “It was difficult to build the design that Woz did as normal engineers had trouble understanding how it even worked,” Alcorn told Retro Gamer. “It wasn’t released as a product until we got a normal engineer to redesign it so it could be understood, built and tested. It went from about 20 chips to around 100. But it was a great game.”
Wozniak’s version also kept track of the bricks in memory chips, which were expensive, and it had no coin mechanism, no sound and no two-player game. Atari gave it to Cyan Engineering, and Cyan’s Gary Waters used it as the starting point for a new design fit for mass production. From the outside, Wozniak later admitted, the result was “virtually identical” to his own.
The screen was black and white. Strips of coloured cellophane over the monitor coloured every two rows of bricks, and the colour told the player how many points a brick was worth. The ball sped up as the game went on, and once it broke through to the red rows at the top, the bat shrank.
Breakout and the Apple II
Wozniak and Jobs started Apple Computer with Ronald Wayne in 1976, the year Breakout came out. The game stayed in Wozniak’s head. In the same BYTE interview he said that when he added colour graphics commands to the BASIC for his next computer, the Apple II, he did so because “I wanted to write Breakout”. He added a command to plot coloured squares, used cheap NE555 timer chips to read four paddles, and put a speaker in the machine. Then he demonstrated Breakout at the Homebrew Computer Club, “totally written in BASIC”. A game that had needed dozens of chips could now be a program that anyone could change. The Apple II went on sale in 1977 with game paddles and colour graphics as standard.
At home and after
Atari converted the game for its own console, the Atari 2600, as one of its earliest arcade conversions for the machine; Retro Gamer called it “an okay version, making good use of the console’s paddles”. Classic Gamer Magazine recorded how its programmer was chosen: Brad Stewart played the coin-op against a new hire, Ian Shepherd, for the job, and cleared the wall with his first ball. Two versions of Breakout were also built into Atari’s Video Pinball console.
Super Breakout followed in the arcades in 1978. Unlike the original it ran on a 6502 microprocessor, so none of the old circuit could be reused. Ed Logg wrote it in his spare time from another project, from ideas that a colleague, Owen Rubin, said had come from Bushnell, and gave it three games: one with two balls and two bats, one with extra balls trapped in cavities in the wall, and one in which the wall crept down towards the player. It became a pack-in game for the Atari 5200.
In Japan, Tomohiro Nishikado at Taito was “hooked” on Breakout, and it led him to Space Invaders in 1978 (the Space Invaders entry tells that story). In 1986 Taito returned to the idea itself with Arkanoid, whose capsules, aliens and final boss made it the version most later brick-breakers were compared with.
Atari’s own later versions include Breakout 2000 for the Jaguar console (1996), a 3D Breakout for the PlayStation, PC and Mac in 2000, from Hasbro, which had bought the rights to Atari’s games, and the iOS game Breakout Boost. A game carrying the Atari name, Breakout: Recharged, followed in February 2022.
Sources
- Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, p. 42: Bristow’s account of Jobs, the $100 bonus per IC and “80 to 30 ICs”; the timeline date for Breakout.
- Gregg Williams and Rob Moore, “The Apple Story, Part 1”, interview with Steve Wozniak, BYTE, December 1984: the chip targets and fees, the four days and the flight to Oregon, 42 and 44 chips, “700 bucks”; writing Breakout in BASIC, the 555 timers and paddles, the speaker and the Homebrew Computer Club demonstration. Read in the transcript at apple2history.org (web, secondary): https://www.apple2history.org/museum-a-l/articles/byte8412/
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999; first published 1993), chapter on Bushnell: Wozniak helping Jobs, the $100 bonus per chip, “Jobs made himself $5,000”.
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, p. 61, feature on Nolan Bushnell: Bushnell on Breakout and why Atari’s engineers would not volunteer for it.
- Stuart Hunt, “The Story of: Breakout”, Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, pp. 34–39: racquetball, Bushnell and Bristow; Jobs at Atari and Wozniak at Hewlett-Packard; the home Pong and Alcorn’s job offer; the $700 fee, the $350 share and the $5,000 bonus; Alcorn’s recollections and the chip counts; Gary Waters and Cyan Engineering; the cellophane, points, ball speed and shrinking bat; April 1976; the 2600 version and its paddles; Super Breakout, Ed Logg and Owen Rubin; Video Pinball and the 5200; Space Invaders and Arkanoid; Breakout 2000, Hasbro’s Breakout and Breakout Boost; Apple’s founding.
- Alistair Charlton, “Steve Wozniak: I cried when Steve Jobs kept Atari bonus to himself”, IBTimes UK, 15 December 2011, reporting Wozniak’s interview in the BBC documentary Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy (web, secondary): https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711
- Classic Gamer Magazine, vol. 1 no. 5, September 2000, p. 56: Brad Stewart and Ian Shepherd’s contest for the 2600 version.
- Retro Gamer Collection, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 247–251, Jonti Davies, “The Making of: Space Invaders”: Nishikado and Breakout, as cited in the Space Invaders entry.
- Breakout: Recharged, Steam store page (web, secondary): developers Adamvision Studios and SneakyBox, publisher Atari, released 10 February 2022. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1714190/Breakout_Recharged/