What is Breakout?

The developers of Breakout clearly conceived it as a sequel to MacSoft's Pong — the characters have the same appearance and the puzzles share its look and feel. Unfortunately, it’s an underfed sequel — It took us several days of gameplay to get through all of Pong’s levels, but we finished Breakout depressingly quickly. Of all the games MacSoft has introduced based on Atari classics. Breakout is the weakest by far.

Breakout is based on the 1976 Atari game by the same name (originally written by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak!) in which you play one of the paddles from Pong... Your task is to free first yourself, then your comrades from imprisonment. In most cases, you simply destroy a barrier by hitting the bricks that comprise it with a ball, but this game has a few unique tasks that you won’t find in the original game — fleeing a wolf, battling a dragon, and bumping ducks come to mind. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, Breakout lacks substance. The game feels slipshod compared to Pong — you can’t alter the controls once gameplay begins, and the tutorial game actually misidentifies them.

And winning Breakout feels trivial; we finished the entire game in less than a single day. To add insult to injury, many of the character designs are cutesy enough to discourage anyone but a Barney-loving toddler. While the game has its high points, you’ll find many better games on the market for your 20 bucks.

Sammis, Ian. (October 2001). Breakout. MacAddict. (pg. 47).

Download Breakout for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

• 233 MHz G3 processor
• Mac OS 8.5
• 32 MB free RAM
• 350 MB hard drive space
• ATI Rage Pro video card
• OpenGL
• GameSprockets

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver