Blockbuster

Before action games and 3D animated adventure games, the main go-to games were in this puzzle-type genre. BLOCKBUSTER is exactly what it sounds like, a game where you bust blocks. A ball goes back and forth breaking blocks on every impact, the player's object is to control a paddle that saves the ball from falling and continues the momentum. Each time the ball hits the paddle, it bounces back to break another block. To clear one level, you must bust all blocks. This simple physics-based game requires speed and tact in controlling where to move the paddle and how the movement controls the ball. The fun increases when some blocks give powerups of various new abilities. Players can release these power-ups after collecting many bonus score points.
As you can imagine, the difficulty increases with every new level, the shapes of the blocks change and it gets harder to save the ball. Some blocks become indestructible and will require more than one hit.
As a low graphic intensive game, it’s going straight to the fun. The pixelated image does not detract from the gameplay, rather, players will likely be very immersed in saving the ball. By the right side of the screen, there is a scoreboard of the total points a player earns by breaking each block. Underneath that is also the cache of powerups the player has accumulated so far.
With such simplicity comes a lot of popularity. BLOCKBUSTER is available on so many platforms; commodore 64, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, BBC micro, and DOS. It was released in 1988 in the US, and the UK by Mindscape Inc., And various iterations of it have been made ever since.

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