What is it?
BreakThru! is often listed as a Tetris clone, maybe because it was published in the USA by Spectrum Holobyte, or because, yes, there are some falling blocks in it. But actually the gameplay concept of BreakThru! is a new one, though it may well appeal to Tetris fans.
At the beginning of the game you find yourself confronted with a solid wall consisting of blocks of different colors, and a timer. Where two or more blocks of the same color touch, you can click on them, and they vanish. The goal, of course, is to clear out the wall completely within the time limit: SameGame under pressure.
At the top of the screen, blocks are constantly floating by, sometimes accompanied by helpful items like bombs and rockets. If you click on them, the whole row will fall down, and occasionally they will fall down anyway. Bombs can be triggered once they reach the bottom row and will destroy the blocks around them, rockets can be launched any time and will destroy any block in their way. On later levels, you will see some annoying objects like coke cans and spiders, too.
BreakThru! can be tricky because it is not easy to see which strategy should be applied, and how strategy can be applied at all. One reviewer saw it mainly as a game of chance, and that's what it more or less will be as long as you're not experienced with it.
But the real weak spot of BreakThru! is that it becomes repetitive over time. You have to go through each level four times at the same difficulty setting before you are treated to a new background picture, new background music, and slightly different block design. But once you have cycled through all six cities (Berlin, London, Moscow, New York, Peking, San Francisco, though not necessarily exactly in that order) you have to start over again on a higher difficulty level! At this point, you feel no sense of achievement any more. Why go where you have already been?
On the loading screen you will see Copyright 1989, 1994
.
It would make sense that the game was originally concieved in 1989.
Tetris was new and very popular, and
Chain Shot, the original
SameGame, was available for the major
Japanese home platforms. A programmer familiar with the Japanese
software scene might well have combined the both. This is, however,
mere speculation. There is no way to tell which game this 1989
notice refers to, and whether it was released at all.
The first version of BreakThru! that is somehow tangible is
The Wall. It was the first game of the Zoo Corporation, a
company founded in 1986 that had previously specialized in Unix
database products, most notably for Sony's entertainment divisions.
In the 90s, they tried to get into the growing Windows market. They
developed some pharmacy management systems. With The Wall,
they established their game division in 1993.
I said somewhat tangible. When the Zoo Corporation got their
first website in 1996, they had obviously already stopped selling
it, and offered no other information than a small boxscan. The box
shows a prisoner breaking up a wall with a sledgehammer, so this
was probably the theme of the game. Under staff, the website has
a page for Steve Fry, but it contains no info beyond that he was
Zoo's connection in Canada.
.
Then Spectrum Holobyte licensed it for distribution outside Japan. They had it completely revamped, with more music and new graphics by Presage Software, and renamed it BreakThru!, maybe as an association with Breakout. Of course they wanted to link it to Tetris and so they put an Alexei Pajitnov, Creator of Tetris, Introduces on the box, and on the title screen of the SNES version. But actually Pajitnov had nothing to do with it.
BreakThru! was published for Windows, SNES and Gameboy. In Japan there was also a version for the Sega Saturn. The Gameboy conversion was done by Realtime Associates (their website seems to have gone down some time in November or December 2004), the SNES conversion by Artech Digital Entertainments, again a Canadian company. There is a persistent rumor that a DOS version exists, but I could never verify it and consider it a myth. There was, however, a Macintosh version. It seems that it was the only version distributed in Japan—by the Zoo Corporation.
