Super Breakout

1978 · Action · Arcade

About Super Breakout

Super Breakout (1978) is Atari's sequel to Breakout, designed by Ed Rotberg and Ed Logg, which added multi-ball modes, ran on a 6502 processor and later came packed with the Atari 5200.

Super Breakout in Depth

The basic play is unchanged from Breakout: the player uses a paddle to bounce a ball into a wall of destructible bricks. Super Breakout, though, offers three modes. "Double" gives the player two paddles at once, one above the other, with two balls in play. "Cavity" starts with one ball, but two more are trapped in pockets inside the wall and can be freed. "Progressive" moves the whole wall down step by step, speeding up the longer the ball stays in play. As with its predecessor, the arcade version is displayed in black and white, with overlays on the monitor to add colour.

Where the original Breakout was built from discrete logic, Super Breakout uses a MOS Technology 6502 CPU. Home versions came in colour and all include a version of the original Breakout: the 1979 Atari 8-bit cartridge supports up to eight players taking turns, and the VCS port, first sold by Sears under its Tele-Games brand in October 1981 and then by Atari in January 1982, adds two easier "Children's Version" games.

Making Super Breakout

Ed Rotberg wrote the game, with Ed Logg assisting on the design, and Atari released it in 1978. It was commercially successful in Japan, where it was the ninth highest-earning arcade video game of 1978, and in the US, where it was the eighth highest-earning of 1979. Atari published colour home versions for most of its consoles and computers, and it became the pack-in game for the Atari 5200 in 1982, which, unlike earlier versions with paddles, used the system's analogue joysticks. Creative Computing's David H. Ahl thought it a curious choice, since it hardly used the 5200's higher resolution and had the same number of bricks as the VCS version, though he preferred its lettering. An Atari ST version by Paradox followed in 1987, and Majesco released it for the Game Boy in 1998 and Game Boy Color in 1999. Flux magazine ranked it 93rd among the top 100 video games in 1995, and Atari brought it to the iPhone in 2008.

Super Breakout Trivia

Namco and Esco Trading released it in Japan.
Logg helped after hearing Nolan Bushnell wanted Breakout updated, and went on to co-design Asteroids; Rotberg later designed Battlezone.
Atari sold 4,805 arcade cabinets.
A 1982 Kid Stuff record told the story of an astronaut breaking through a rainbow force field with bouncing missiles of light.
The Atari ST and Game Boy versions use sculpted bricks like Arkanoid.