Arkanoid ARCADE

Arkanoid is Taito’s 1986 arcade game, reviving and refining Atari’s earlier Breakout with the addition of a story, power-ups, and named stages. Designed by Akira Fujita and Hiroshi Tsujino as the winning entry from an internal Taito contest pitting two design teams against each other, you control the space vessel Vaus, bouncing an energy ball to destroy brick formations across 33 stages.

Power-up capsules dropped from destroyed bricks add lasers, a wider paddle, ball-slowing effects, and other temporary abilities, layering strategic choices onto the simple bounce-and-break core loop. It became one of the highest-grossing arcade cabinets of its era and was ported to nearly every home computer and console platform that followed, cementing the brick-breaker genre’s modern template.