Arkanoid: tale of a timeless classic

With Arkanoid: tale of a timeless classic our weekly column continues # fridaynostalgia dedicated to retrogaming. Here is our tale of an epic game.

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1986, who is writing at this very moment had two years of life, was strong on the radio Madonna, with her Papa don’t preach, he A-Ha they churned out one of the best songs of all time, take on me also thanks to a video clip able to combine real actors with scenes drawn with comics. One masterpiece after another came out at the cinema, da Platoon a Top Gun, From Moscow a Navigator, Via Aliens. In those years full of life and creativity, the Japanese software house Taito was about to launch on the market a title destined to become a real icon in the history of video games: Arkanoid.

THE PLOT FIRST OF ALL

The thing that amazes more than any other, compared to Arkanoid, is that, in perfect antithesis to what is claimed by the creator of DOOM, on the substantial uselessness of the plot in video games, in this title the plot is there and how. During a journey into deep space, the mothership Arkanoid is in fact destroyed by a mysterious hostile force. We are the only ones to save ourselves, aboard the small spaceship "Vaus“, But we will soon be trapped in a space-time fold. In this two-dimensional place, we will have to face increasingly difficult levels, trying to get to the person responsible for all our troubles, the alien entity Doh. Renamed, in some conversions, the "Size Change". Getting to defeat him, to see the epilogue, will be anything but easy.

"I'M YOUR FATHER"

Arkanoid is the spiritual sequel to a 1976 game for Atari: Breakout. In Atari they wanted to replicate the success of Pong, but with a product that was playable by one player only. They entrusted the project to bushnell e Bristow, who went to work in 1975. Bushnell, to make the necessary improvements to the card, turned to a young employee of Atari, who some time before had shown him a revolutionary Pong card. That employee was none other than a young man Steve Jobs and the card was made by his friend and partner Steve Wozniak.

The two games have virtually all aspects of gameplay in common. Also in Arkanoid the aim of the game is to knock down all the bricks that I compose the level through the use of a sphere. This sphere must be hit using our shuttle as a support. Our movements are limited to a horizontal scroll at the bottom of the level. Obviously, if we fail to hit the sphere, it gets lost at the bottom of the screen, causing us to lose one of our lives. Once the three, canonical, lives are over, the game is lost and it's time to start over. The more bricks you hit, the faster the ball speeds up, making the game more and more difficult.

INSPIRED YES, BUT RICH IN NEWS

Despite the inspiration from the Atari title, Arkanoid introduced a lot of new features for a title "ball and racket". In addition to the numerous graphic innovations, characterized by a colorful and modern style, some interesting variations were added. The most important is certainly that of upgrades dropped from broken bricks. In the form of capsules we could have benefited from some bonuses.

The red capsule "Laser”Allowed us to add laser cannons to our various, giving us enormous advantages in terms of offensive potential. The blue capsule increased the lunghezza of our capsule. The green allowed us to magnetize the hull, gluing the ball onto our module with each touch. The orange one it slowed down the speed of the ball. The purple capsule created an opening from which to jump immediately to the Next Level. The blue one divided the sphere into three parts equal, giving us moments of pure enjoyment. The gray capsule gave us a precious one extra life.

THE MEETING WITH DOH

Overcoming the former 32 levels it was far from easy. In fact, if the first paintings turned out to be fairly linear, from a certain moment onwards special bricks appeared. These bricks were able to change color after being hit, taking longer to destroy. The infamous bricks silver increased the number of hits needed to be destroyed by one unit every 8 levels. The bricks gold instead they were simply indestructible.

Once we got to the last painting, we should have dealt with thealien DOH, the one responsible for all our misfortunes. This being, unique boss of the game, it was represented by a head vaguely resembling the head of a statue Moai of Easter Island, and was capable of throwing a large number of objects at us. To defeat DOH you had to hit him well 16 times higher with our sphere. This picture was also the only one that we could not replay in case of defeat, not even by inserting other coins, which is instead possible in the other levels.

A GAME THAT MADE HISTORY

Arkanoid, thanks to its skilful combination of various elements, has become a real milestone in the history of video games. The record, with an “extremely difficult” setting, is dated 7 September 2008 and is held by Nick Mollison with 1,156,930 points. 1.658.110 are instead the points made by Zack Hample on March 13, 2000 and still holds the world record at a "normal" level today.

Arkanoid reminds us, once more, that there is a clear distinction between the simplicity in the idea behind a very successful product and its extreme practical difficulty, something that in the 80s was a custom in the world of games and today, gradually, has been lost in favor of less frustration of a generation of more demanding but much less patient gamers.