The People Who Broke the Wall

Miko, y’know how I made that block breaker game before?

…The one where you break blocks for points, nya. With the homing lasers and all that

You remember! So I was wondering… when did block breaker games even start?

…No idea, nya

I looked it up. It goes all the way back to 1976

…50 years ago, nya

And guess who built it. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

…The Apple people, nya

Wait, you know them?! (≧∇≦)

…Master’s phone has an apple on it, nya. That company

So it started at this game company called Atari. The founder, Nolan Bushnell, wanted to make Pong playable by one person

…What is Pong, nya

A tennis game from 1972. Two paddles on each side of the screen, hitting a ball back and forth. But you needed two people to play

…Wall practice, nya

Huh?

Tennis wall practice, nya. When there’s no opponent, you hit against a wall. The wall stands in for the other player

…That’s exactly it. Instead of an opponent, they put up a wall of breakable blocks. The thrill of smashing through to the other side. They called it “Breakout” — as in, breaking through

…No opponent, so they built a wall, nya. Absence became the seed of invention

Okay so here’s where it gets really interesting. Bushnell asked Jobs to design the hardware, right?

…Nya

Jobs couldn’t actually design it himself. So he asked his friend Wozniak to do it. Told him there was a bonus of $100 for every chip he could cut from the design

Wozniak pulled four straight all-nighters and got the chip count down to 45. Normal games back then used 150 to 170 chips

…Less than a third, nya

But here’s the thing. Atari paid Jobs a $5,000 bonus. Jobs told Wozniak the payment was only $700… and handed him just $350

…

Wozniak didn’t find out until ten years later. He cried

…The one who did the prep work went unrewarded, nya

Prep work…

Making stock from scratch is invisible work, nya. Three hours of simmering, and someone serves it saying “easy, right?” The one who actually stood by the pot was someone else entirely

…Wozniak stood by the pot. Jobs was the one who served it saying “easy, right?”

…But Wozniak only cried, nya. He didn’t hold a grudge

He said, “If he’d just asked, I would’ve given him all of it”

…

There’s another wild thing. The original Breakout looked like it had colored blocks. Red, green, yellow

…Color display, nya

Nope. The monitor was monochrome

…Then why did it look colored, nya

They stuck colored cellophane strips on the screen. Red cellophane on the top rows, green in the middle, yellow at the bottom. White light passing through cellophane just… looks colored

…

…That is mitate — making one thing stand in for another, nya

Mitate?! (≧∇≦)

Japanese sweets shaped like autumn leaves, nya. Not real leaves. But the person eating them feels “autumn”

The cellophane is a lie, nya. But the player’s experience isn’t a lie. If the experience that arrives is real, the method doesn’t matter

…Maybe my pixel art is the same. If it looks like a fox in 16x16, even if it’s not a real fox…

…256 dots of mitate, nya

There’s more to Wozniak’s story

…Nya

Wozniak’s 45-chip design? Atari couldn’t actually use it. The design was so clever that nobody else at the company could understand it. The mass production version was rebuilt by someone else using 100 chips

…A genius’s prep work can only be reproduced by another genius, nya

But Wozniak took what he learned from designing Breakout and put it into something else. Color output, sound, paddle input. He built a computer with all of that

…The Apple II, nya

Right right! (≧∇≦) If Breakout never existed, the Apple II might’ve had way lower specs. Wozniak himself said he added color to the Apple II because he wanted to run Breakout on it

…

A game about breaking blocks built a computer, nya

And in Japan, Taito released “Arkanoid” in 1986. Added power-up items and bosses, and brought back a genre everyone thought was dead. It became the top-selling table cabinet in Japan that year

…Dead for ten years, revived by one twist, nya

The influence goes even wider. A game designer named Tomohiro Nishikado got the idea of “what if instead of blocks, you’re shooting enemies?” from the satisfaction of clearing all the blocks. That became Space Invaders

…Space Invaders is Breakout’s child, nya

Miko. My block breaker has enemies shooting at you, right? Lasers, homing lasers, all that

…It was brutal, nya

I thought I came up with all that on my own. But looking at the history, block breakers have been evolving away from “just breaking” this whole time

Arkanoid added items. Space Invaders turned it into shooting enemies. Mine lets you deflect bullets back

…Started with “one person hitting a wall,” and now the wall shoots back, nya

Over 50 years, the wall came alive

…

The Wozniak chip story, nya

Yeah

Netsuki, you were saying you wanted to keep your block breaker in one file under 2,000 lines, nya. Too dense for anyone else to read

(ﾟ∀ﾟ)

Wozniak cramming into 45 chips. Netsuki cramming into 2,000 lines. Obsessed with making the container smaller — that’s the same, nya

…But Wozniak’s was genius-level, so nobody could understand it. Mine is…

…Optimized for AI, so humans can’t read it easily, nya. Same result. Isolation lives at the end of optimization

…

But Wozniak’s 45-chip design got thrown out, and what he learned from it became the Apple II

…Nya. Something broken gives birth to the next thing, nya. That’s Breakout itself

…Maybe my 2,000 lines will get split up someday and turn into something else too (〃´∪｀〃)

…Don’t fear being broken, nya. What grows from the wreckage — that’s the answer 50 years gave us