Breakout – Obsolete Gamer

We talk with Miami native, Aaron Varkonyi, developer of, Aliens go Homerun an innovative and interesting take on the classic game, Breakout. We talk with Aaron about his game, being a developer in South Florida and his upcoming game, Wonder Wickets.

The Obsolete Gamer Show

J.A. Laraque

The Obsolete Gamer Show: Aaron Varkonyi (Aliens go Homerun)

Blog

J.A. Laraque

Did you know: Vol 1

There is a little more to this story. With the success of Pong, created by Nolan Bushnell, he and Steve Bristow came up with an idea to create a single player version of Pong and so the concept of Breakout was born. Steve Jobs was tasked with creating the game and brought on Steve Wozniak to help engineer the game. After a lot of sleepless nights and other adventures the project was done. Now in the end Atari had to do some reworking to Wozniak’s design before the final product was released, but overall that is why Steve Jobs got the credit for the creation of Breakout.

Arcade Games

Simon Lethbridge

Arkanoid

Arkanoid may have been released a full decade after Breakout but the simplicity of both games means neither really requires a huge amount of computing power. Indeed, while the graphics here are tidy and colourful there’s nothing really noteworthy about them and there’s no music at all, just a few sound effects, but none of that really matters with a game like this, which is still regarded as the pinnacle of its genre. There’s good reason for its reputation too. It was always amazingly playable and that remains the case today.

Editorials

Patrick Scott Patterson

Steve Jobs 1955-2011: Technology pioneer worked in the early days of Atari

Jobs and Wozniak would later pair up to work on Atari’s 1976 release Breakout, the ball-and-paddle brick-breaking game that has been cloned a million times over, from 1987’s arcade hit Arkanoid to countless Flash-based clones on the internet today. Offered a bonus by Atari if the number of chips that could be eliminated from the machine, Jobs offered to split the bonus with Wozniak, who worked for days on end to reduce the design to such a degree that Atari was unable to figure it out and had to redesign the circuit board over again. Despite the fact that Wozniak did the work, Jobs took most of Atari’s bonus money for the project without Wozniak’s knowledge.

Hardware

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Atari Flashback

Among the included games, some gems of the early video gaming history are to be found: Adventure, Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Revenge, Food Fight, Haunted House, Asteroids, Centipede, Warlords. You’ll also get the dubious pleasure of experiencing the previously unreleased Atari version of the famous Saboteur. Just don’t expect all those games to run as smoothly as they used to on the old machines.