Brick Breaker

How to play brick breaker

1. Steer the paddle — follow with the mouse, drag with a finger, or tap the arrow keys — and tap or press space to launch the ball.
2. Aim with the paddle itself: the middle sends the ball straight up, the edges whip it out at sharp angles. Catching is aiming.
3. Clear every breakable brick to finish the level. Silver bricks take two hits; steel ones never break — play around them.
4. Catch falling capsules for 50 points and their effect: LONG, SLOW, MULTI, LIFE… and FLIP, which reverses your controls until another capsule cures it. The pills all look identical. That's the game.
5. The ball speeds up after the 4th and 12th hit of a rally, and touching the ceiling shrinks your paddle for the rest of the life. Three lives, twelve levels, then the pack loops faster — the best score is saved on this device.

A little background

Paddle, ball, wall of bricks: the formula came out of the arcades in 1976 — complete with the rules this version keeps, the staged speed-ups and the paddle that shrinks once you've rattled the ceiling. But the name "brick breaker", and the version most families actually remember, belongs to the phone era: the little game preloaded on every BlackBerry from 1999, thumbed through a million meetings on a silver paddle the size of a fingernail. Its word-labeled capsules — and the cruel FLIP pill that looked exactly like the helpful ones — are the memory this version is built around.

Twelve hand-built levels — checkerboards, vaults, a grin — loop forever, a little faster each lap. No batteries, no holster: free, no ads, no account, and it works offline once loaded.