Chapter 9. Using variables to build your one-player ball-and-paddle game
The people who made the Atari game Breakout also started a brand that will be familiar to anyone with a Mac computer or an iPhone. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, two of the three founders of Apple, made the game Breakout in four days.
Steve Wozniak includes the story of this game in his book, iWoz. He made his own version of Pong to play at home using a television set. It was about a year before Atari made their home version. Steve Jobs worked at Atari, and Wozniak showed them his television-based Pong while visiting Jobs. The people at Atari loved it so much that they offered Wozniak a job, but he turned it down.
Atari went on to develop its own version of Pong that could be played at home, and it was such a huge hit that Nolan Bushnell at Atari wanted to play with that ball-and-paddle format, making a different kind of game. Look at the difference between Pong and Breakout. In Pong, you’re hoping your opponent misses the ball, similar to real Ping-Pong. In Breakout, you’re aiming for the bricks, trying to clear the board by bouncing the ball against the wall. In one case, you want to miss the target, and in the other, you want to hit it.