Breakout — Brick Breaker

Breakout reached arcades in 1976 as Atari's single-player answer to Pong — Nolan Bushnell's concept, with the prototype famously engineered by a young Steve Wozniak while Steve Jobs handled the deal with Atari. A decade later Taito's Arkanoid (1986) added falling power-ups and a laser, and that hybrid is what everyone now means by "brick breaker". This version follows the same lineage: pure paddle-and-ball at the core, with the Arkanoid-style toys on top.

There are 12 handcrafted levels laid out as recognisable shapes — checkerboards, pyramids, a fortress, a steel maze. Coloured bricks break in one hit, tougher bricks take two and crack visibly after the first, and steel bricks never break at all, so you route the ball around them. Broken bricks sometimes drop power-ups: multiball, a laser paddle, a wider paddle, slow ball and an extra life are worth catching, while the paddle-shrinker is a trap to dodge. You start with three lives, and your best score and furthest level are remembered by your browser, so you can continue where a run ended instead of always restarting at level one.

The paddle is the whole skill. The ball rebounds according to where it strikes: dead centre sends it back near-vertical, the tips fire it out at a sharp angle — so you aim by choosing the contact point, not just by getting there in time. And every brick broken before the ball returns to the paddle raises a combo multiplier, which is why the classic trick of tunnelling up a side channel and letting the ball rattle across the top rows is also where the big scores live.