Breaking Out

A subgenre of Action Games, often referred to as "Breakout clones" or "Arkanoid clones". In Japan, "Block Kuzushi" is the common name for the genre.

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, 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. Or Breakout Character as these games don't typically feature much of a story.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• In Overlord: Raising Hell, 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.
• Warlords
• Aliens Go Home Run!
• Exidy's TV Pinball (1975), the Ur-Example.
• 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.
  • Indeed much like the macOS easter egg below, these mainly came about because of Steve Jobs' love of Breakout so legend goes. For the latter day scroll-wheel color iPods, Apple even made their own clone with a few circle based tweaks called Vortex.
• An Easter Egg in macOS 7.5 allows you to play a version of this, with the developers' names printed on the blocks.
• Shatter.
• Magic Orbz.
• Krypton Egg.
• 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. If you allowed them to touch, the blue ball would swallow your ball whole, digest it, and spit its dessicated corpse back at you. Even if you manage to intercept the mangled remains with your paddle, it just flies past. This creature from the darkest pits of the lowest hells was named The Cannibal. 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 Genesis.
• The Macintosh was host to several Freeware and Shareware twists on the game:
  • Brickles had the option of up to four simultaneous paddles, meaning that the ball could never touch any side of the screen.
  • Shatterball took the concept into 3D.
  • Block Buster combined Breakout with Pong.
  • Un-Breakout placed the bricks below the paddle, and asked you to defend instead of break them.
  • Diamonds and its spinoff Diamonds for Kids had no paddle and only direct control of the ball's horizontal motion, but it could only destroy bricks of the same color it was. The Action52 Sega Genesis ripoff Bonkers copied this concept.
  • The BeeBop trilogy by Daniel Clav offered a slightly more puzzle-oriented take on this genre. Some levels had internal walls that would disappear when all the immediately accessible bricks were removed. The deadly lasers that usually appeared underneath the paddle would sometimes appear above the bricks or even on the side.
• FunOrb 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.
• Alpha Bounce, another clone with RPG elements, and Recycled IN SPACE!, is an online version. It has been ported to DSiWare, with some changes and further elaboration.
• 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.
• Taito's Puchi Carat combines basic ball-and-paddle gameplay with a few Puzzle Bobble-like twists.
• DX Ball and DX Ball 2.
• Alleyway for the Game Boy, developed by none other than Nintendo themselves.
• Hoshizora Block
• Thunder & Lightning
• Titan by Titus Software attempts to break out of the mold by giving the paddle complete two-dimensional freedom of movement.
• Activision's Oink!! for the Atari 2600 reverses this, as you try to stop the Big Bad Wolf from using his breath to knock holes in your wall big enough to come after your three little pigs.
• Jardinains! and its sequel are Breakout clones with nains that throw junk at your paddle and generally want to make your life miserable. You can knock them off their bricks and bounce them with your paddle to get powerups if you want revenge.
• Exidy's arcade game Circus (and its Atari 2600 adaptation Circus Atari), in which you bounce around a pair of acrobats to pop three rows of balloons in the air.
• The black-and-white Atari ST game Bolo (not to be confused with several Similarly Named Works) gives the player full control over two axes of paddle movement. However, it also has some blocks which release enemies that kill the ball on contact.
• Woody Pop is Sega's take on Arkanoid, complete with a similar powerup system. It was originally released in Japan only for the Sega Master System and later ported to the Game Gear in all regions.
• Kirby's Block Ball is breakout but with Kirby!
• The Bricks Of series, in which brick-breaking comes in underwater, Egyptian or medieval flavour.
• ''Missilebreak Outvaders combines it with Space Invaders and Missile Command.
• Blast Thru.
• Hyperballoid is breaking shapes (not just bricks) with a ball that bounces off a paddle.
• Thro' The Wall, on the Horizons demo tape that came with the ZX Spectrum and thus the first game many owners of the Spectrum ever played.

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.

Pinball

• In Williams Electronics' The Shadow pinball, there's a mini-playfield in the upper-left corner called The Battlefield, which plays like this. When activated, the pinball rolls around the field, and the player moves a bat left and right with the flipper buttons to make it hit various targets.
• The Wispy Woods bonus stage in Kirby's Pinball Land is a simple Breakout clone.
• Crüe Ball has a hidden game where you play Breakout using a flying Flipper Sled against exploding skeletons.
• The Pinball Deluxe table BRIX is a hybrid of Breakout and pinball, using destroyable bricks instead of pins.

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. ...Controlling 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.
• The paint brushes lines from Kirby: Canvas Curse take on properties that allow for an imitation of Breakout when pitted against Kracko and Kracko Jr.
• LittleBigPlanet has some levels like this, made by the community in the Level Editor. Of course, the big draw here isn't that it's a Breakout clone, it's that it's a Breakout clone made with the in-game tools.
• The Atari Jaguar, PC, iOS and Android versions of Rayman feature a Breakout clone in the form of a hidden mini game called Ray Breakout. Instead of breaking bricks, you hit plums, and instead of controlling a paddle, you control Rayman.
• Antonball Deluxe: Antonball is a game of Breakout set in a Mario Bros.-style arena. In addition to the usual brick-breaking, Anton uses other platforming skills to dodge and attack stage hazards that can harm him just as much as missing the ball. The mode Vs. Antonball pits up to four players against each other to break the other side's bricks first.

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.
  • The Luiginary Wall attack in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is a breakout style mini game, with the version used in Battle Broque Madame (the second mini game test section) being one with power ups, a score up to 999 and various other things.

Shoot Em Up

• Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers plays like a very strange hybrid of Breakout and a danmaku shoot 'em up. For one thing, the ball can safely touch the floor (it just resets your score gain), but touching it directly will kill Reimu. She need to perform actions like swinging her gohei or throwing talismans to actually swat the ball away. Next, some levels have indestructictible turrets that shoot at you, and at higher difficulties even the blocks shoot bullets when destroyed. Finally, every 5 levels there's a Boss Battle where Reimu needs to direct the ball to hit them while dodging all the bullets they shoot.
• The MCP Cone sequence in the TRON arcade game is Breakout done as a shoot-em-up.
  • Squeeze Box for the Atari 2600 has this play mechanic for the entire game.

Sports Game

• The Bonus Dungeon of Zany Golf includes a Breakout scenario.

Others

• The programming puzzle site Advent of Code has puzzle 2019-13 where you must use the Intcode interpreter (built as part of previous puzzles) to simulate a Breakout style game and automate it so you break all the blocks.
• FMV game Snow Job features a Breakout minigame that entails gradually uncovering a picture of a scantily-clad lady, as well as loud sound effects.
• Idle Breakout is a hybrid of Idle Game and breaking blocks, also on a far grander scale since with tens or even hundreds of balls bouncing around.

Non-Video Game Examples

• Deconstructed in the xkcd comic Archway. Cueball hits a brick archway with a ball, and the brick falls on his head.

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