Two future Apple co-founders once spent a caffeine-fueled week wiring together the game that inspired Brick Breaker, years before either of them had heard of a personal computer company they'd start themselves.
How to Play Brick Breaker
Brick Breaker gives you a paddle at the bottom of the screen and a ball that bounces around a wall of colored bricks stacked above it. Move the paddle to keep the ball in play, angling your hits to direct the ball toward clusters of bricks and clear them out row by row. Every brick you hit disappears and adds to your score, and the ball speeds up as you clear more of the wall, demanding sharper reflexes the deeper you get. Miss the ball and let it fall past your paddle, and you lose a life — clear the whole wall, and the next level loads with a fresh layout and faster pace. On RivalPit, you can chase a high score solo or compete against a friend to see who clears more bricks before running out of lives.
The History of Brick Breaker
Brick Breaker is a modern take on Breakout, released by Atari in 1976. The game was conceived by Atari's Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, but the job of actually building a working prototype fell to a young technician named Steve Wozniak, who took on the challenge with help from his friend Steve Jobs — both of them Atari employees years before either would go on to co-found Apple. As the story goes, Bushnell offered a bonus for every chip Jobs could shave off the circuit design, and Jobs promised a four-day turnaround on a project that would normally take months. Wozniak did the actual engineering, spending consecutive late nights soldering the hardware together while still working his day job at Hewlett-Packard, and delivered a design using far fewer chips than a typical arcade board of the era. Breakout hit arcades on May 13, 1976, and its brick-clearing, paddle-and-ball formula proved so simple and compelling that it became one of the most cloned game concepts in video game history, with Brick Breaker as RivalPit's version of that enduring format.
The Breakout project left a lasting mark beyond the arcade, too. Wozniak later said that designing Breakout's hardware directly influenced features he built into the original Apple II, including its color graphics and game-paddle support — meaning the DNA of this simple brick-clearing game genuinely helped shape the personal computer that helped launch Apple.
Why Play Brick Breaker on RivalPit
- Free and no download. Brick Breaker runs instantly in your browser.
- Real-time multiplayer. Challenge a friend with a link, or race the clock solo.
- Points, never money. Earned by playing, never purchased or wagered.
- One of 100+ free games on RivalPit, with new games added every week.
Brick Breaker is part of RivalPit's free arcade games lineup, alongside Snake, Space Invaders, and Whack-a-Mole. Want to challenge a friend to clear more bricks than you? Check out our guide to playing games online with friends with no download.