The mechanic that launched a thousand games

The Pong game mechanic is so simple and so effective that its impact can be felt far and wide throughout the annals of video game history.

From Pong, we get Breakout. The innovation here is to turn Pong into a single-player game like real-world handball or squash, with the addition of a breakable brick wall. Breakout introduces stages or levels to the Pong concept, each with a different configuration of bricks:

Arkanoid iterates on Breakout by changing the skin to a sci-fi theme. The paddle becomes a spaceship. Arkanoid adds a few new features, most importantly power-ups that come in the form of capsules that are released when the ball smashes into the bricks. When the player catches the capsules with the spaceship, the game rules get bent. The spaceship can become longer. It can become sticky so that the player can catch the ball and plan the next shot. My favorite Arkanoid power-up is the red capsule marked L; it enables the spaceship to fire laser beams to destroy the bricks!

The Pong legacy brings us all the way to the present day, with Peggle by PopCap Games. Peggle combines a few different game mechanics: the brick-smashing and ball-bouncing of Breakout, the angular aiming of Bust-A-Move or Puzzle Bobble, and the random insanity of real-world pachinko games. To jazz up the skin, PopCap adds cartoon unicorns and gophers, and in one of the most-talked-about payoffs in video game history, Peggle rewards players with an absolutely over-the-top slow-motion winning shot while blaring the climax of Beethoven's ninth symphony!

Peggle teaches us some important lessons: