How to play
Five rows of nine bricks fill the upper half of the board — forty-five in total. You get a paddle on the bottom edge and three balls for the whole session. Launch, keep the ball alive, and clear the wall. When the last brick goes, a fresh wall appears, the level counter ticks up, and the ball gets faster — your remaining balls carry over untouched, so a level five reached with three balls still in hand is a very different position from one reached with your last.
The launch is not under your control. The ball leaves at a random angle between 18 and 42 degrees from vertical, to the left or the right, chosen fresh each time. That means the first bounce is dealt to you rather than aimed, and the first thing you do after every launch is a recovery move, not a plan.
Scoring rewards depth. The top row pays 50 points per brick and each row down pays ten less, ending at 10 for the row closest to you. A complete wall is worth 1,350 points. Two players can clear the same number of levels and finish hundreds of points apart purely on the order they took the bricks in.
Controls
- Keyboard: ← → or A D move the paddle at a fixed 560 pixels per second. Space launches, pauses, resumes, and restarts after a game over.
- Mouse: the paddle tracks your pointer horizontally with no acceleration and no lag, which is the precise option. Click the board to launch.
- Touch: drag along the board to move, tap to launch. Scrolling is suppressed while your finger is on the board.
- Auto-pause: switching tabs pauses the game and says so in the status line.
The paddle is a dial, not a wall
Here is the mechanic everything else depends on. When the ball touches the paddle, the game measures how far from the centre it landed, converts that offset into an angle of up to roughly sixty degrees from vertical, and sends the ball out at that angle at the current level speed. Dead centre returns the ball straight up. The outer edge returns it at a steep diagonal. Nothing else matters — not which way the paddle was travelling, not how fast you were moving it, not the angle the ball arrived at.
That is a stronger tool than it looks, because it means you choose the return, every single time. The skill ceiling in Breakout is not reflexes, it is deciding where on the paddle to take the ball and then actually putting it there.
The classic use is the side tunnel. Take the ball on the far edge of the paddle to fire it at a steep angle into one of the vertical channels at the left or right end of the wall. Chew a column open, get the ball above the wall, and it will rattle between the ceiling and the top rows on its own, taking the 50-point bricks several at a time while you wait. One good tunnel is worth more than a minute of careful front-row play, and it is the reason experienced players deliberately ignore the bricks nearest them.
The opposite habit is the one to unlearn. Beginners chase the ball with the paddle centred under it, which returns it almost straight up, which sends it straight back down to the same spot, which produces a long vertical rally that clears one brick per trip. It feels safe and it is the slowest way to play.
One warning about steep angles: near sixty degrees the ball spends a long time crossing the board and very little time descending, so it arrives at your end unexpectedly late. If you are dying right after an edge hit, you are probably still standing where you fired from.
What we saw across our own sessions, as estimates and nothing more: on level one the ball travels at 250 pixels per second, which gives you a little under a second of reaction time between the wall and the paddle. Each cleared wall multiplies that by 1.07, so level five is about 30% faster and level ten close to double. Most players who have not learned the tunnel stall at level 3 or 4; with it, reaching level 6 with a ball to spare is a realistic target.
Where Breakout came from
Atari released the original Breakout cabinet in 1976. It was conceived internally by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow as a single-player descendant of Pong, and the prototype hardware was designed by Steve Wozniak, who was working with Steve Jobs at the time — a well-documented episode from the year before Apple shipped the Apple II. The design goal was a chip count low enough to be cheap to manufacture, which is why the original has no scoring flourishes and no power-ups.
The genre it created is still going. Taito's Arkanoid (1986) added falling capsules, multiple balls and boss fights, and effectively defined the modern block-breaker. This implementation stays close to the 1976 idea on purpose: no drops, no multiball, no extra lives. The whole game is the angle dial.
The code is ours, written for this site. The board is a fixed 640 by 440 internal grid scaled to your screen, the physics run in sub-steps of at most four pixels so a fast ball can never tunnel through a brick, and exactly one brick is resolved per frame so that a hit on the seam between two neighbours produces one clean bounce instead of two contradictory ones. Your best score is stored on your own device and is never sent anywhere.
Questions players ask
Why does the ball bounce differently every time?
The contact point on the paddle sets the angle, up to about sixty degrees from vertical. Centre sends it straight up, edge sends it out at a steep diagonal. Paddle movement does not change the result at all.
Are the back rows worth more?
Yes: 50 points at the top, then 40, 30, 20 and 10 at the front. A full wall is 1,350 points, which is why reaching the top rows early matters more than clearing tidily.
How much faster does each level get?
Seven percent per cleared wall, starting at 250 pixels per second. Your three balls are never replenished, so speed accumulates while your margin for error does not.
Can a fast ball pass through a brick?
No. Movement is split into sub-steps of four pixels or less and collisions are checked at every one, so tunnelling is impossible regardless of level speed.