[Writer and game theorist Eric-Jon Rossel Tairne, aka Eric-Jon Waugh is presenting a new column on "the growth and curious development of that relationship between the game world and the player. This installment moves forward in time to look at Atari's classic 1976 title Breakout.]
Though
Pong, which we
covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.
The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player.
Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality -- a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus -- then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.
You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.
For about four years, no one significantly built on
Pong. You saw things like four-player
Pong, and
Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented
Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.
Atari did experiment a bit with
Gran Trak 10 and
Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of
Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.
As these things go,
Breakout was pretty well-named.
Breakout (1976)
You know
Breakout. You’ve the single
Pong paddle at the bottom; up above you have several rows of tiles. Hit the tiles with your ball to break them. Break all the tiles to move on. The original
Breakout has just two levels; clear the bricks twice, and you’ve won. Or at least, you’ve earned the highest possible score and there’s nothing more for you to do except bat your ball around an empty room. Which, I suppose, is no less entertaining than
Pong.
The main thing that
Breakout does is that it defines a tangible world, and then shifts the burden of narrative from a second player to the gameworld itself. This sounds simple and obvious, but it’s a profound move.
Breakout changes the whole premise of a videogame from an empty medium or catalyst for competition to a persistent system for an individual to explore.
It’s not just Solitaire, as the game’s laws are automated. This casts the player in the role of explorer, free within narrow limitations to act and to study the game’s reactions. And unlike the earlier
Gran Trak 10, the world and the rules that define it are dynamic. When you break a tile, it’s not a matter of success or failure; rather, what you’ve done is changed the world, which in turn significantly redefines your situation in respect to that world. And this, here, is the basic premise of a videogame.
Basically, without particularly changing the setup from
Pong,
Breakout gives the player something to touch. Something to meaningfully affect, and change. This in turn creates a distinct, if simple, narrative. It’s still fairly indirect contact, of course; all you’re doing is reflecting a ping back against that ocean floor. Yet every positive movement you make, every reflection, asserts your involvement. Your mere presence in the gameworld is significant. The act of playing changes the course of events, introducing chaos to what had been a static, stable system.
As with
Pong, the player involvement is kept to an absolute minimum: twiddle a knob left and right. Given the simplicity of the targets, that lingering indirectness may be the game’s main appeal. The task, the goal, is to successfully make contact despite a lack of direct control over the situation. There's a certain friction here similar to a game of pinball; although you don't really have control over the ball or where it goes, you are responsible for guiding and protecting the ball, and the lack of control only enhances your determination to hit those targets.
The driving compulsion is to hit every tile there is to hit, to explore all there is to explore, to clear the board. There is a distinct end condition here, lending an object to the narrative. A personal impetus, inspired by the gameworld. Fundamental as it is, you can take this same framework and apply it to
Pac-Man or
Zelda, or
Myst or
Half-Life 2. It's all the same relationship; it's just the details that differ.
Breakout is where the bond between the player and the gameworld really begins.
Breakdown
Breakout’s influence was immediate and enormous, in three distinct areas: technology, logistics, and experience. On the technology end, I’m sure you know about Woz’s involvement, and how the development of
Breakout led to his Apple II. It also gives an early glimpse at Steve Jobs’ mindset, if you look up the term “$5000 bonus”.
I’m also sure you know how the microprocessor-based remake,
Super Breakout, was Ed Logg’s first major contribution to Atari. From there we get
Asteroids (to
SpaceWar! as
Breakout is to
Pong),
Centipede, and
Gauntlet, and the open-ended, proto-sandbox style of design traditionally favored by Western developers: giving the player a canvas for making decisions and bathing in their consequences. This is more or less a pure extrapolation of videogame theory, as first illustrated in
Breakout.
And then there’s
Tomohiro Nishikado, who felt inspired to reach out and directly touch those tiles. How, though, can you keep the game interesting without the random element of a bouncing ball? The key word: scenario.
Next time on Phantom Fingers: The Series: Space Invaders
[Eric-Jon Rossel Tairne is a writer most recently hailing from Brooklyn, New York. When he manages to detach his brain from his keyboard, he spends his hours concocting bagels and exploring the deep places of the Earth. You can sponge up more of his work at gloaming.aderack.com.] 
