Hacker Puts A Physical Touch On The Gaming Classic Breakout

With XBox Kinect and Nintendo Wii developers tried to bring a more physical element into gaming. I do not know if it is accurate to say that it was successful or not. Neither of those options feel as if they correctly depict how these devices have performed as far as sales go. They certainly managed to make gaming more physical but more can be done. Designer and artist Jorge Nuno Coutinho might have succeeded with his physical take of the old classic Breakout.

I personally love gaming, and every spare minute I get (which isn’t much these days) I try to play a few of the current popular games. Adding a physical element to the Breakout game is what I would call genius. The game, which features a bouncing ball and a brick which you bounce it on, is ultimately known for being super easy to understand yet enormously addicting. I can definitely vouch for that as a friend of mine and I used to play this particular game after school to see who was better at it.

This was of course back in the ’80s. However, today a little bit more “immersion” is necessary to catch the gamers of today’s attention. Jorge’s hack is actually an art installation called “Revenge Of Revenge Of Doh” (RoRoD for short) and was setup at the 9th edition of the Black & White film festival, and as you can see from the video demonstration the new incarnated Breakout game was heavily appealing to people.

So what does it do? Well, you are playing against the computer, and you are playing simultaneously. While the computer uses the old retro way of trying to break bricks, you have to break them with a set of balls, which you throw on the wall that the Breakout game is projected on. The one who breaks the most bricks and after all bricks are gone wins. Hacks like this remind me of how much I love old school games! They were a whole lot easier to understand, and you could play them on a 5 minute break without being horribly late getting back to whatever you were doing. More retro games should be reincarnated like Breakout. All I am saying is retro FTW!