"Arkanoid" was designed by Akira Fujita and Hiroshi "ONIJIST" Tsujino, both of whom were members of Taito's Yokohama Research Institute. The company's sales department requested a new block breaker arcade game due to the genre beginning to see an upturn in popularity, following a steady downfall in the early 1980s. This led to a competition being held within the company to design the new game which was jointly won by Fujita and Tsujino, who were then instructed to combine their ideas into a single project. The game builds on the overall block breaker concept established in Atari's "Breakout", a widely-successful arcade game that spawned a long series of similar clone games by other manufacturers.