Breakout (video game) Breakout (video game) Breakout is an arcade game developed and published by Atari, Inc., released on May 13, 1976. It was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, influenced by the 1972 Atari arcade game "Pong", and built by Steve Wozniak aided by Steve Jobs. "Breakout" was the basis and inspiration for certain aspects of the Apple II personal computer. The game was ported to the Atari 2600 and was followed by a 1978 sequel, "Super Breakout", which four years later became the pack-in game for the Atari 5200 console. "Breakout" spawned an entire genre of "Breakout" clones, and the
Spacewar! coin-operated video games. While playing "Spacewar" at Stanford sometime between 1966 and 1969, college student Hugh Tuck remarked that a coin-operated version of the game would be very successful. While the high price of a minicomputer prevented such a game from being feasible then, in 1971 Tuck and Bill Pitts created a prototype coin-operated computer game, "Galaxy Game", with a US$20,000 PDP-11. Around the same time, a second prototype coin-operated game based on "Spacewar", "Computer Space", was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, which would become the first commercially sold arcade video game and the first widely available video