In the game, a layer of 'bricks' lines the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, 'bouncing' off the top and side walls of the screen. When the ball hits a brick, the ball bounces off and the brick disappears. The player loses a life when the brick touches the bottom of the screen, and to prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle that the ball can bounce off.

This amazingly simple, yet addictive game, has been remade countless times, and is the basis of countless remakes, including Super Breakout, and Arkanoid.

The original circuit for Breakout is rumored to have been put together by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; the founders of Apple Computer. According to this myth, Wozniak managed to program the original game with an incredibly small number of circuits. Unfortunately, Wozniak's design was so complex that Atari's engineers couldn't work out how it worked, and thus couldn't put the original circuit into mass production; the game's circuits had to be redesigned before being put into mass production.

Woz apparently also got upset about the fact that Jobs, who handled negotiations with Atari, short-changed him.