The Brick

Your ball disappears when your paddle just meets the wall. Right here is where you'd need reflexes, but they're useless — physics works here the way the developers wanted it to, and their taste was quite original.

The Brick is a classic arkanoid-breakout game from 1990 that nobody really adopted and that lies in archives like a forgotten coin. You'll be smashing brick blocks by bouncing a ball while playing around with gravity and the moods of mechanics that seemed predictable the moment they looked novel. The goal is simple: clear the screen of blocks, let yourself tinker with a few power-ups, and try to keep your ball from falling down.

Which sounds clean, but here's the catch: the ball's physics behave strangely. Sometimes it bounces logically, other times it takes a weird path, as if the game is arguing with itself about what laws actually apply here. The paddle responds sluggishly, movement across the screen has hints of lag. On a 386 PC with DOS, it wasn't faster or more visually interesting than other similar games — it was just a game you'd play when you had nothing else left.

The Brick represents an era when it was possible to make money on the simplest repetition of something that worked in the eighties. It wasn't a classic, wasn't a hit, wasn't even a memorable experiment. It was just another clone that brought nothing special and took nothing away either.

Today you look at it with what time has taken from it — and time took this game pretty hard. If you want to look into the abyss of early nineties mediocrity, here's your chance. But if anything lasts longer than five minutes for you, you'll change your mind.