Brick breaker
Slide the bat left and right to catch the ball — drag with the mouse or a finger, or use the arrow keys. Catching it near the edge sends it off at a sharper angle, so you can aim. The ball speeds up a little with every brick.
Slide the bat to catch the ball — drag with the mouse or a finger, or use the arrow keys. Catching it near the edge sends it off at a sharper angle. Catch what falls from a brick for a wider bat (↔), a slower ball (S) or an extra life (♥). Clearing every brick takes you to the next stage, and each stage sends the ball 5% faster than the one before it — stage 100 runs 125× the speed of stage 1. Score and lives carry over, and each difficulty remembers how far you got.
Seven columns by five rows, three lives, ten points a brick
The board starts with 35 bricks, the same at every difficulty. A brick is worth 10 points and a caught drop 20. Letting the ball past the bat costs a life and puts the ball back on the bat waiting to be launched — any speed gained resets to the stage's starting speed, a widened bat returns to its normal width, and anything falling disappears. At zero lives the game ends; clearing every brick opens the next stage.
Where the ball meets the bat sets the angle
The bat's centre is 0 and its ends ±1, and the ball leaves at that value times 65 degrees: the nearer the end, the shallower the angle; the centre sends it almost straight up. Straight up alone drills one column and never finishes, so if the sideways component falls below 18% of the speed it is pushed out to that much, nudged slightly differently each time. A launch also leaves at 25–55 degrees off vertical only. For the last brick or two, catching on the bat's end to bend the angle hard is the quick way.
5% faster per stage, and 0.6% faster per brick
Stages run from 1 to 100, with stage 1 at ×1 and each stage multiplying speed by 1.05 — stage 10 is ×1.55, 20 is ×2.53, 40 is ×6.70, 100 is ×125.24, and the multiplier is printed beside the stage selector. Within a board, each brick makes the ball 1.006 times faster, capped at 1.5 times the stage's starting speed. A slow drop multiplies speed by 0.85 but never below 0.7 of the start. Difficulty sets only the starting speed (76, 95, 118) and bat width (26, 20, 15); stages touch speed alone.
Three drops, and records
Breaking a brick has a 14% chance of dropping something — a wider bat (45%), slow (35%) or a life (20%). The bat widens by 1.35 each time up to a width of 34, and lives do not stack past 5. Nothing bad falls, so there is nothing to dodge. Clearing a board carries score and lives into the next stage and resets only the bat width. The best score is kept per difficulty, and so is the highest stage reached, in this browser — clearing stage 40 on easy does not unlock stage 40 on hard. A score of 0 is not a record.
Common questions
QCan the ball pass straight through a brick?
No. If the ball travels further than its own diameter in one frame it flies past bricks, and since nothing is left behind you only notice it as "sometimes it doesn't break". So each frame is cut into steps shorter than the ball's diameter. Simulated at 0.2-second lumps, an unsplit step misses bricks; split, it misses none.
QDoesn't catching it dead centre send it straight up forever?
That is guarded against. A purely vertical ball drills one column and the board never finishes — forty out of forty test games once stalled exactly that way. Now a centre catch still gets some sideways movement, and that amount is nudged slightly each time so the path never settles into a repeating loop.
QWhat changes between difficulties?
Ball speed and bat width; the bricks are the same. The speeds were measured, not guessed: each was played out with the worst possible strategy — parking the bat directly under the ball every frame — to see how long a board takes. The first values gave 174-second boards, so they were roughly doubled.
QIs this a copy of the Atari game?
No. The shape comes from Atari's 1976 *Breakout*, but the rules belong to nobody and hundreds of games have used them since. What is Atari's is the name and that rainbow wall of bricks, and neither is used here — the brick colours are generated from each row's height.
QCan I choose a stage?
Up to the one you have reached. Clearing a stage makes the next appear in the selector, and it is saved in the browser so you can pick up there next time. Each difficulty counts separately, so reaching stage 12 on normal still leaves hard at stage 1. Clearing stage 100 returns you to the start.
QHow fast does the bat move on the keyboard?
While an arrow key or A/D is held, 78% of the board's width per second. It is not a fixed hop per press; the bat moves smoothly for as long as the key is held, so the operating system's key-repeat rate does not get in the way. Space or Enter launches the ball, and the mouse or finger keeps steering the bat even outside the board.