Fireball

Fireball is a Breakout variant released for the Atari 2600 in 1982 by Arcadia Corporation. It was not an ordinary cartridge — the game loaded from tape through the Supercharger add-on, which gave the console extra memory. That is why it moves in a way most 2600 titles simply could not.

Instead of a paddle you get a juggler. A little figure runs along the bottom of the field, catches the fireballs and throws them back up into a wall of bricks. The bounce is therefore not the pure geometry of Breakout: you have to be in the right place at the moment of impact, and the man has a shape of his own that you need to account for. The second big change is the number of balls. Up to six can be in play at once, each on its own path, and once five of them are loose you stop aiming for precision and start deciding which ball you are willing to lose.

The walls behave differently depending on the mode you pick — some just sit there and crumble, others slide sideways, cascade, or march down towards you. The original control was a rotary paddle, so movement is quick and twitchy, the pace climbs steadily, and the closing seconds of a round are usually chaos.

To be fair, this is still Breakout. There is no progression and nothing to hold you past a handful of rounds, and next to the more ambitious Supercharger releases it feels like a short filler between bigger games. What does hold up is the one extra idea — the juggler and the swarm of balls — and it holds up well. Up to four players can take turns, which helps a lot; on your own it wears thin, because ten minutes show you everything the game has.

On oldgame.cz Fireball runs straight in your browser, with nothing to download or install.