Breakout T-Shirt

Created by Atari in 1976, Breakout utilised existing 'Pong' technology to create a new game concept based loosly around raquetball.
The idea was simple, as the ball hits the bricks in the wall, they dissapear until all are gone and the level is completed.

Coloured cellophane was used to make the bricks appear in colour... now that's ingenious!

As with many games at the time, Breakout has a colourful history. Back in 1976, arcade games were entirely hardware based with no processor running code. To keep production costs down, Atari wanted to reduce the number of chips used. They assigned this task to Steve Jobs, then an Atari engineer. He was promised $100 for every chip eliminated from the design. Jobs couldn't do it himself, but instead coaxed a friend, Steve Woznaik to tackle the problem.

The final design took four days to complete, gave both men Mono from lack of sleep, and earnt Steve Jobs a whopping $5,000 bonus - none of which found it's way to Steve Woznaik!

The design however was too complicated for Atari's engineers to mass produce, and so they ended up designing a new system from scratch anyway.