Atari 2600 Breakout, released on May 13, 1976, was an influential game that had a significant impact on the video game and computer industries. Conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, and influenced by the 1972 Atari arcade game Pong, Breakout was a huge commercial success in arcades, ranking among the top highest-grossing arcade video games in both the United States and Japan during 1976 and 1977.
The game involves a layer of bricks lining the top third of the screen, with the player’s goal being to destroy them all by repeatedly bouncing a ball off a paddle into the bricks. The Atari VCS port, released in 1978, used color graphics instead of a monochrome screen with a colored overlay.
Breakout spawned an entire genre of clones and later inspired Taito’s 1986 game Arkanoid, which itself led to numerous imitators. In Japan, the genre is known as block kuzushi (“block breaker”) games. Additionally, Breakout served as the basis and inspiration for certain aspects of the Apple II personal computer and Taito’s arcade shoot ’em up game Space Invaders (1978).
(source: Wikipedia)