Breakout !

Breakout ! is a video game in the action genre originally released in 1986. It is currently playable on DOS.

Breakout ! is a first version of the classic brick breaker game.

Basically this game is like all the others, the player has five balls and must keep them in play by moving a paddle across the bottom of the screen. The ball(s) bounce around the screen destroying the bricks they hit and thus the player earns points.

This game was designed to be used with a mouse, although a keyboard can be used if necessary, and has some unusual features. The playing area is divided into two sections and the game starts with the mouse positioned over the window on the right, where the menu options are. As soon as the player clicks START, the control switches to the left area, where the game takes place, and moving the mouse left and right moves the panel. Any other mouse click switches the control back to the menu. It can be played as a multiplayer game. When the game loads, it asks for the number of players and there is no upper limit that can be supported by the machine's memory. In preparing this presentation a game was played with forty-four players, but the game documentation states that a machine with 640K of memory should be able to support 'more than three hundred and fifty players'. During the game, the player can switch to the menu section and PASS. This means that his game is put on hold and the next player can take his turn, when the first player's turn arrives again his game continues from the point where he left off.There are no fancy brick arrangements in this game and no power-ups, just a simple wall. When a player goes through the wall and their ball starts bouncing between the back wall and the last row of bricks, the game goes into 'expert mode', which means the ball moves faster and the paddle shrinks.The menu area has an EXIT button, however, this does not stop the game, it just stops the game for that player, so when playing a multiplayer game each player must EXIT individually if they want the game to display scores at the end of the game.
There are no configuration options in the game but, as was customary at the time, the developer provided some command line options that affect game play.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.