Breaking Out



A subgenre of Puzzle Games, often referred to as Breakout clones or Arkanoid clones.

In their simplest forms, you control a paddle at the bottom of the screen, which you use to bounce a ball to destroy blocks. If the ball is not bounced back, it goes off the bottom edge of the screen and the player loses a life. Powerups and enemies are common in these games, even though they were absent from the original Breakout.

Callbacks to classic arcade games often include segments like these.

Not to be confused with The Protomen song with the same trope name.

Action Adventure

 * In the Raising Hell expansion-pack of Overlord, you get to play Breakout with a rolling, morbidly obese halfling... as soon as you finish taking him through the mini-golf course.
 * A Breakout-like minigame in 3D Dot Game Heroes is called "Blockout". Your hero's shield is the paddle, but you can use his/her sword to help propel the ball faster.

Action Game

 * Break Quest actually has a physics engine, so objects can bounce and spin in reaction to being hit as well as many other effects such as teathered or sprung objects, allowing for a lot of variety in it's level design.

Fighting Game

 * The various DLC for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces contain a minigame called Bind Breaker, where you use the ball to destroy the blocks that make up the characters' Barrier Jackets, stripping them down to bathing suits. Not for the more conservative of fans.

Platform Game

 * Lyle in Cube Sector has you fight a boss in this manner.
 * In I Wanna Be the Guy, there is a room where you must do this to open the path to the next room. Missing the ball--in this case Delicious Fruit--doesn't kill you, but it removes a block of the ground that you are standing on, revealing deadly spikes. Once you've cleared a path to the exit, you must then dodge the ball as you make your way out of the room, or else it will kill you.
 * In Vexx, one mini-game in Tempest Peak Manor, the fourth world, has you playing Breakout. ...On a GIANT-screen TV. ...Controling the joystick by standing on it.
 * Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, a NES title, inverted this trope. One of the minigames had a ball-spitting face trying to destroy a block wall Jackie was standing on. The player had to deflect the balls by punching and kicking them, to avoid the complete destruction of the wall.

Puzzle Game

 * Breakout, the Trope Maker
 * Arkanoid, the Trope Codifier
 * Color TV Game Block Kusure/Breaker
 * Bachelorette Party and Bachelor Party.
 * iPods come with a Breakout game -- possibly as a callback to Apple's very first personal computers that also came with Breakout.
 * An Easter Egg in Mac OS 7.5 allows you to play a version of this, with the developers' names printed on the blocks (drag the text "secret about box" to the Desktop).
 * Shatter.
 * Magic Orbz.
 * Diamonds, and the Action 52 Genesis ripoff Bonkers.
 * The unlicensed NES games Dudes with Attitude and Trolls on Treasure Island.
 * Super Puzzle World 3 (A Super Mario World) hack has this for the first castle, complete with a Reznor edit to look like Pac Man. You can see it at the end of this video
 * The Commodore 64 had Krakout, remembered fondly for its addictive gameplay and incredible music, and not so fondly for the most dastardly Arch Enemy in video game history. On later levels, an unassuming blue ball would appear (behind walls of bricks, see video from 8:40) which tried to match your ball's height on the screen. Somehow, losing the ball off the side of the screen was no longer the worst thing that could happen.
 * Bad Omen (a.k.a. Devilish) for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis
 * The MCP Cone sequence in the Tron arcade game.
 * The Macintosh game Brickles, and later, Shatterball, which took it into 3D.
 * Fun Orb has "Brick-À-Brac".
 * The Putt-Putt series spin-off Putt-Putt and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama, which has you bouncing Pep into the air to pop all the balloons before moving onto the next level.
 * Wizorb, an Xbox Indie and PC game with some RPG Elements.
 * DSiWare has AlphaBounce, another clone with RPG elements, and Recycled in Space.
 * The vanilla DS had an Eidos release called Nervous Brickdown, which presented ten different flavors of Breakout-style gameplay in various settings, each one controlling slightly differently.
 * The Ricochet series, beginning with Xtreme, then Lost Worlds and Infinity. The latter two are known for their complex Level Editors.

Rhythm Game

 * BIT.TRIP BEAT uses it for a level boss.
 * BIT.TRIP FLUX combines it with Pong for another boss.

Role-Playing Game

 * One level of Marvel Ultimate Alliance contains this as a minigame.
 * Bowser's special move using his koopa minions in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is a breakout minigame.

Shoot'Em Up

 * The very first Touhou game, Highly Responsive To Prayers on the PC-98, plays like a very strange hybrid of Breakout and a Danmaku shoot 'em up. For one thing, you have to swat the ball away from Reimu, or else it will kill her...