How to play Breakout online
Breakout was designed for the Atari paddle controller, a dial you turned to slide your paddle left and right. The emulator above switches to paddle mode automatically for this game.
- Move the paddle: left and right arrow keys
- Serve the ball: Space bar
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Choose a game variation: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Switch between paddle and joystick mode: Alt + L
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
The goal of the game
Six rows of bricks sit at the top of the screen. You bounce the ball off your paddle to knock them out one by one. Miss the ball and you lose a turn. You get five turns to clear two complete walls. The home version has six rows instead of the arcade’s eight, and five turns instead of three, because the 2600 hardware could not handle the full arcade layout.
The ball speeds up as you break through to the higher, more valuable rows, and once it reaches the back wall it starts to feel like a different game. The Atari 2600 port also added colour: the arcade cabinet used a black-and-white monitor with strips of coloured film stuck over the screen to fake the coloured rows.
Breakthru and other variations
The cartridge offers several variations, which you cycle through with the Select switch before starting. The most interesting one is Breakthru, which was new to the home version. Here the ball does not bounce back when it hits a brick; it ploughs straight through the whole column until it reaches the top wall. It is faster and more chaotic than the standard game, and a good choice if the original feels too slow.
Tips for a higher score
- Aim with the paddle’s edges. Where the ball lands on the paddle changes its angle. Hitting it near the edge sends it off sharply to the side.
- Dig a tunnel. Break through one side of the wall early. Once the ball gets behind the bricks, it bounces around the back rows and clears them for you.
- Stay central when the ball is high. Move back to the middle of the screen while the ball is up among the bricks, so you never have to cover the full width.
- Expect the speed-up. The ball gets faster as you reach the upper rows. That is the moment most turns are lost, so concentrate there.
Why Breakout matters
Breakout grew out of Pong: instead of playing against an opponent, you play against a wall. The arcade original was among the highest-grossing games of 1976 and 1977 in both the USA and Japan. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on the arcade hardware before founding Apple, and the Apple II computer contains hardware ideas inspired by Breakout’s circuit design. The 2600 cartridge sold over 1.6 million copies by 1983.
The game started a whole genre. Taito’s Arkanoid revived the idea in 1986 with power-ups, and block-breaker games are still made today. If you arrived here after searching for “atari breakout”: in 2013 Google hid a playable Breakout Easter egg in its image search for that phrase. This page is the real 1978 Atari 2600 version that inspired it.
Similar games to play next
- Super Breakout – the official sequel, with multiple balls and more variations
- Video Olympics – Atari’s collection of Pong-style paddle games
- Circus Atari – bounce clowns off a seesaw to pop rows of balloons
- Kaboom! – Activision’s fast paddle game about catching falling bombs
- Warlords – up to four players defending their castles with paddles