Their first system, the Apple I, was sold in kit form. ![]() Jobs and Wozniak had formed Apple Computer on the 1st April 1976, mere days before Breakout appeared in arcades across America. Wozniak’s Breakout experience would later have a profound impact on the production of the Apple II. Space Invaders is essentially, as Nishikado has admitted himself in later interviews, Breakout with bricks that move and shoot back. Tomohiro Nishikado’s design for Space Invaders, released to extraordinary success in 1976, was directly inspired by Breakout, with its emphasis on stages and high-scores. ![]() While Breakout’s gameplay would continue to be borrowed and stolen for decades after, its influence went far beyond mere bat-and-ball games. Like Pong, it was soon cloned repeatedly by rival manufacturers, but the incoming wave of affordable home computers and consoles would also mean that a version of Breakout – official or otherwise – would soon make its way to every system known to humanity.Ītari continued to capitalise on the success of the Breakout name in the years that followed, with Breakout Deluxe following on later in 1976, Super Breakout arriving in 1978, and Breakout 2000 appearing for the ill-fated Atari Jaguar console in 1997. The finished Breakout, which Atari modified slightly from Wozniak’s design due to its complex layout, arrived in arcades in on the 13 April 1976. Jobs, however, paid Wozniak just $375 for his invaluable assistance – a piece of information that would reportedly put further strain on the pair’s partnership years later. Jobs was ultimately rewarded with a $750 dollar wage plus a $5000 bonus. True to form, Wozniak not only completed the prototype over four sleep-deprived nights, but also eliminated 50 extraneous chips from Jobs’ initial design. Struggling to get the game built, Jobs brought in his friend and future business partner Steve Wozniak to help him finish the prototype of Breakout in just four days – then an employee of Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak had a reputation for his hardware designs that used a remarkably small number of microchips. At a time when microchips were extremely expensive, Atari were anxious to reduce the cost of each Breakout coin-op, and offered Jobs a $100 bonus for every chip he managed to eliminate from the initial concept. ![]() While the concept for Breakout was Nolan’s, it was none other than Steve Jobs, then a low-level technician working a night-shift at Atari, who took up the challenge of building the prototype itself.
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