Breakout homebrew for the NES?

Has anybody in the homebrew community ever created a "Breakout" version for the NES or does an unlicensed version exist that can be bought or recreated somewhere?
I'd like to have one in my list of NES games, but for this kind of game, I'd rather prefer an infinitely looping highscore game like the actual "Breakout"/"Super Breakout" that you can play in between, instead of games like "Arkanoid", "Crackout" or "Alleyway" that have a huge number of levels and a definite ending/winning condition.

The forthcoming Action 53 Volume 3: Revenge of the Twins includes Brick Breaker. Other than that, I'm not aware of a finished clone of Atari's Breakout for NES.

Is there a ROM of "Brick Breaker" somewhere?

I also found this one:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gy6eiCYk3U
But I assume it wouldn't be easy to track it down as a cartridge. And neither fceux not Nestopia plays the ROM.

The first post to the Brick Breaker project topic has the ROM

There's source, too. Feel free to ask me anything about it if you want to dig into the code.

The only flaw I can think of in my game is how the paddle works... to make it good I would need to change the paddle size but it's too late for that now.

edit: here https://github.com/AleffCorrea/BrickBreaker
I see that you want an endless game, the game is set up in a way that makes adding/removing level layouts easy, you could also change the "endgame" state to reset the level # to 1 instead of showing the credits and quitting to the title screen.

Breakout? I coded a quick NES game 3 weeks ago (commissioned), but the blocks you're breaking, are the clothes on a pin-up model!

Whether or not the game ever sees the light of day, remains to be seen, though. That decision really isn't up to me.

This might be my specific taste again and your game is surely nice in its own right, but I was looking more for a classic version of "Breakout" with small blocks, not with 16 x 16 bricks.

It's ok, good luck finding a suitable game. I feel like having 16x16 bricks in my case was a design mistake anyway but that's a story for another time.

Now I feel kinda like making one It can't be that complex.

That said, I'm curious what you're looking for - You want a short game to play "inbetween", but also want it to be infinitely looping? Arkanoid has an ending for sure, but it's very long, lasting over an hour, which is longer than most people would normally be able to play any looping game. It has a built in level select, and many of the earlier levels can be skipped with some button combination, allowing you to play the game however you want. Getting a high score in it is not that easy, especially when you don't have a spinner to control it. In general, you'd be really hard pressed to ever find a better Breakout implementation than Arkanoid.

So if the Arkanoid model isn't what you want, how would your ideal Breakout game work? Should it have a randomization element to the levels, or should it just literally be the same concept with a set of predesigned stages that just loop from the beginning with some modifier to the difficulty (such as ball speed) whenever you beat them? Should the game have gimmicks such as boss fights, or are you looking for a pure zen block breaking experience?

Yes. Like "Tetris": The game simply gets harder and harder. But since it has no end, there's no goal that you have to reach.

In "Arkanoid", losing means failure. So, playing the game is actually a "mission": If I make it, I have won, otherwise I have lost.

But an infinitely looping game with maybe five different levels that simply gets harder and harder: You will eventually lose anyway, so there's no mission to complete. You just play as long until you've lost.

Bosses and all that stuff are not really necessary, but I probably wouldn't mind them.

Randomized levels would be fine as well, but predefined would also be alright.

If such a game exists, I would have to see it and then I would decide for myself whether it's for me. If I don't find a suitable one, I would either live without it or maybe eventually create one myself.

I never really found out: How does the real arcade "Breakout"/"Super Breakout" work in terms of levels? Do they loop? Do they increase in speed?

I never played the original arcade game, but as with every arcade game at the time, I'm pretty sure it's an infinite game that just gets harder.

Tetris works as a "forever" game because its randomization element forces you to constantly adapt to what it throws at you (though essentially NES Tetris will always end at level 29, and there's an actually achievable max score), so for a good endless experience in a Breakout game, I'd think you need something similar to keep it fresh. If you can simply learn the 5 repeating stages, it very easily ends up being just a test of endurance.

In general I think it's hard to design a "good" Breakout game. What makes the gameplay in a game like this genuinely good, as opposed to simply a casual pastime? Personally I like having more of an influence over the angle of the ball (typically: where does the ball hit the paddle, but some games allow you to jerk it upwards similar to a pinball flipper), meanwhile Taito kept things fresh in Arkanoid by adding moving enemies and all sorts of crazy powerups - but those definitely work better with the game being a long sequence of predesigned stages.
Also, how to you measure score in a fair and fun way? I'd say keep some kind of score multiplier based on how long the stage has gone on for, and give the player a method of forcing the stage to play out faster for a simple risk vs. reward element. But there are probably better ideas that I haven't thought of.

To be honest, I didn't really think about the details until now. My original question was just a shot in the dark.
Randomized patterns might work, so that the game infinitely throws new levels at you. Maybe with the ability to enter the randomizer seed as a password, so that two people can play the same collection of levels to see who is better.
Then there can be stuff like scrolling patterns (like in "Alleyway") or, yes, random obstacles/opponents are fine, I guess.


I personally would prefer the classic paddle and physics. No fancy stuff that you can do with the paddle.

I just had a funny Idea of a 2 player game. Player one is playing tetris, and trying to drop blocks down and make a row. Player 2 is playing Breakout, and trying to bust Player 1's blocks.

The original grandiose idea for my game was a 1 vs 1 pong match with each half of the playfield customizable with different types of tiles, mostly bricks. It's a good thing that I rushed out my game's release, I don't think it would've worked now that I look back at the development/design process.

I am reminded of this breakout game where every brick is a smaller game of breakout:
http://www.draknek.org/games/BRICKbricksmashSMASH/

Maybe I'm just really bad at playing Breakout/Arkanoid, but I always felt that having no real way to influence the trajectory of the ball was a very limiting factor that made the game way too reliant on luck to really be fun to play for me. This is especially annoying when you only have one brick left to hit, and the ball just won't go there on its own. You really need some way to support it.

Sorry if I'm taking this too far, I just think it's a really interesting game design subject.

Doesn't the original "Breakout" and "Pong" games allow you to influence the angle of the ball. It depends on how you move the paddle and where the ball lands on it.

To some extend yeah. I definitely think that's absolutely essential to the game.

I couldn't say if there's some bad port of Arkanoid that doesn't give you some influence over the bounce angle, but in the NES version (and all others I can remember) it does. Maybe it's a bit limited, but it's still a critical and essential bit of control.

Though there are some (IMO) poorly designed levels where the bricks you need to hit are at the end of a tunnel/maze of unbreakable bricks and you really can't do much of anything to aim down there.

Influencing the ball like in "Arkanoid": Yes.
But moving the paddle like a flipper: That's what I personally wouldn't like.

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Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson in the video for the song "Scream" played a Pong clone with "flipper" paddles.

That'd go into permanent rotation in my household. I love multiplayer games where the players have different objectives.

Apparently there's been several games like that, where one player is doing top-down tower defense and the other is down there in 3d, attacking. At the time I thought that was a unique idea, but no, that too already existed