About

Breakout, built from scratch in vanilla JavaScript — no frameworks, no build step, no dependencies. It installs to your home screen and plays fully offline.

How to play

Clear the wall without losing the ball. Where the ball strikes the paddle is what steers it: hit it left of centre and the ball goes left, catch it on the very edge and it leaves at a shallow angle. A dead-centre hit sends it straight back up. You get three balls.

The 1976 rules, kept

Eight rows, two of each colour. Yellow bricks score 1, green 3, orange 5 and the red rows at the top 7 — so a full screen is 448 points, exactly as the arcade cabinet counted it.

The ball speeds up four times per screen: after the fourth brick, after the twelfth, and the first time it reaches the orange and then the red rows. And if you break through to the ceiling, your paddle halves for the rest of that screen. That is the trade the original built the whole game around — the fast way to clear a wall is from behind it, and it costs you half your paddle.

What is different

The original stopped after two screens. This one keeps going: each new wall starts faster than the last, and bricks are worth their base value times the level number, capped at twenty. Clearing your first screen scores the classic 448 either way. The paddle comes back to full width with each new screen, which the arcade version did not do.

Keyboard controls

Mouse and touch

Move the mouse across the board and the paddle follows it directly — this is a paddle game, and a knob is what it was built for. On a phone, drag anywhere on the board; only the horizontal position is read, so you can keep your finger low and out of the way of the paddle. The on-screen arrows and Launch button are there as a fallback. Whichever you touched last is the one in charge, so mouse and keyboard never fight each other.

Settings

Three speeds: Calm, Classic and Frantic. Unlike Snake, faster tiers do not pay more — a brick is worth what the original said it is worth, and levels are where the points come from. Speed applies to the next game you start, never to the one in progress.

Notes

The board is a virtual 28×32 grid, so the game plays identically at any screen size or pixel ratio. Collision is swept rather than positional: the ball's path is tested each step rather than its position, which is why it cannot slip through a brick however fast it is going. Local scores are stored in this browser; the global leaderboard is separate from Tetris's and Snake's, so none of the three ever mix.