Atari Breakout is an arcade game developed and published by Atari, Inc. and released on May 13, 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak, based on conceptualization from Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, who were influenced by the seminal 1972 Atari arcade game Pong.
The goal of the game is to use a paddle to keep a ball from falling off the bottom of the screen by bouncing it off the paddle and the walls of a playing field filled with rows of bricks. When all the bricks in a row are gone, the row disappears and the next row falls down. The player loses a life if the ball falls off the bottom of the screen or if it hits the paddle too many times.