Breakout

The brick-breaker classic

Move the paddle to keep the ball in play and clear every brick — angle your hits off the edge of the paddle to control where the ball goes next. Three lives, and the board's cleared once every brick is gone.

Where the genre started

The brick-breaker format traces back to Atari's Breakout, released in 1976 — one of the earliest and most influential arcade games, and a direct evolution of Atari's even earlier two-player Pong. Its DNA is visible in a huge number of later games; if this is your first time playing something in the genre, you've likely already played a descendant of it somewhere else.

Aim off the edges

Hitting the ball with the very edge of the paddle sends it off at a sharper angle than hitting it dead-center — deliberately clipping the edge is how you steer toward bricks in the corners instead of hoping the ball drifts there on its own. It's the one piece of actual technique the game rewards, on top of just keeping the ball alive.

Why clearing the top rows first pays off

Once a tunnel opens through the upper rows of bricks, the ball can get bounced behind the remaining wall and clear multiple rows from above in rapid, hard-to-control bounces — a technique long-time players sometimes call "digging." Deliberately aiming to punch a narrow tunnel straight up through one column, rather than clearing evenly across the whole wall, tends to produce dramatically faster clears once the ball gets loose behind the bricks, though it also raises the odds of losing track of the ball's angle entirely.

A genre that quietly reinvented itself for decades

Beyond direct brick-breaker sequels, this same paddle-and-ball core mechanic has resurfaced repeatedly in genres that don't look like Breakout at first glance — pinball, certain puzzle games, even some rhythm games borrow the same "control an angle of reflection" fundamental. It's one of the more quietly influential mechanics in game design specifically because it's so simple to learn and so hard to fully master.