Arkanoid is the game that put Breakout back on the map. When Breakout first came out in 1976, it was a big hit. It was soon followed by a new machine, Super Breakout. Later, Atari ported it to their 2600 console. In 1983, the sociologist David Sudnow wrote a book about his obsession with this version: Pilgrim in the Micro World. That's not astonishing, it was exactly the time to write this kind of thing. The previous year, Mazes & Monsters had been made into a movie. It was the time to be anti, and computers, video games and all this new-fangled stuff was a good object. When in the next year Apple Computer released the Macintosh, they would make this the core of their advertising. Computers are bad. Only ours are good. But I digress.
The really astonishing thing is that at the time the book was printed, the game itself seems to have been half forgotten. Sure, the new home computers had their more or less official Breakout. On the Commodore 64 it was called Super Smash and featured a tennis player on the box, on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982) simply Breakout. But the only pre-Arkanoid Breakout clones I could as yet find are the arcade machine Wall Crash (1984) and the nearly unplayable Whirlybird for the Commodore 64 (1985).
This changed radically as soon as Arkanoid appeared on the scene. The number of Breakout clones in the late 80s rivals the number of Tetris clones. I guess it would be fair to say that they are actually not Breakout, but Arkanoid clones.
Gameplay is pretty much the classic Breakout thing, with some additions. Occasionally, when you destroy a brick, a letter will fall down. If you catch it with your bat, it will give you some enhancement. This might be a size increase of the bat, or that the ball does not bounce of the bat, but sticks there, two extra balls, a laser that lets you shoot bricks, or an extra bat. Another addition are strange little robots that enter from the top at regular intervals and alter the course of your balls. They are destroyed by the balls and can be annoying, but sometimes even useful.
The 1988 IBM version was programmed
by David Seeholzer. It consists of a dat file and an executable of only
130B. And even of those 130B, a good part is used up for the message
If you can read this, you're too damn curious!
that greets
anyone who tries to hexedit it.
Esc pauses the games, Ctrl + C starts it again. Alt + Q quits, but you have to pause the game first.
I suppose you could play it on an XT, it runs very well on my IBM PS/2 50, in fact, it runs too fast for my taste ;-)
Strangely enough it does not run too fast on a modern computer, but far too slow. Actually it can be quite nice to play it this way, when I later played it in the speed it was intended, I never got past the first level.
Apart from this, it runs well under Windows, even detects the Windows mousedriver, just like Wasteland. Few old DOS games do.
Arkanoid can be played with mouse, joystick, or keyboard. There is some sound and music over the PC speaker.
The
black & white Macintosh version
(1988) is extremely tricky. It would start on my Performa 630, run excruciatingly slow
for a short while, give a game over without real cause and crash.
On my Macintosh SE it wouldn't
start at all, claiming it couldn't allocate memory for sound and
video buffers and advising me to upgrade to 6.0.2—pretty
ironic since this box runs 6.0.5 already.
Naturally, such a successful arcade machine was ported to nearly all the home platforms of the day. Most of these conversions were done by Ocean and published under the Imagine label; the Macintosh and Amiga versions by Discovery Software; the Apple ][ and Apple ][GS versions by Taito America; and the Famicom/NES version by Taito Japan.
