In 1976 two young, barefoot engineers – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak –spent several sleepless days building an arcade game for Atari. Their boss, Nolan Bushnell, had tasked them with simplifying the circuitry of Pong, the first big video game hit, which replicated ping pong with just two rectangles and a circle. They redesigned the game from scratch, replacing the opponent with a wall from which one brick would vanish each time it was struck by an angled ball. Breakout was an elegant, hypnotic demonstration of cause and effect: a parable of control and collapse, rendered in phosphorescent blocks. The game helped to fund the creation of Apple, and in some sense, the digital lives we all lead today.
Nearly half a century later, Ball x Pit feels like its spiritual sequel, a return volley to the point of origin, reimagined for the complexity and anxiety of the modern age. Where Breakout was about demolishing barriers, Ball x Pit is about confronting opponents. Here, bricks are reborn as phalanxes of monsters, advancing down the screen as you hurl cascades of balls to halt their march and clear a path orwards.
Everything has evolved. You now play not as the invisible hand guiding a paddle, but as one of a roster of unlockable soldiers, each with their own quirks and powers. One fires twice as fast but has erratic aim; another lobs balls in high arcs, following the trace of your cursor; a third rains projectiles from the top of the screen, rather than its base. You set the trajectory of your relentless volley. Then, broadly, you hope for the best.
Mercifully, there are ways to even the odds. Fallen foes drop currency used to upgrade your arsenal, adding, for instance, flame or poison effects to your shots. Over time, these enhancements can be combined – along with the characters themselves – as designer Kenny Sun wrings every drop of creative possibility from the ruleset he’s devised.
Between rounds, across multiple levels that range from fungus-draped forests to lava-bubbling caverns, each crowned with a formidable boss, the game shifts gear, becoming a kind of kinetic farming sim. Here, you spend your spoils building homes for your fighters, planting crops and working to methodically upgrade your long-term abilities. It’s a cunning, moreish design, passing you between the two halves of the game that enrich one another, and reviving the oldest arcade instinct: just one more go.
If Breakout was about dismantling the barriers that hemmed us in at the dawn of digital play, Ball x Pit feels like a different metaphor for the times. We struggle against mounting, often overwhelming odds, toiling to keep pace, dividing our meagre resources as we defer, however briefly, the certainty of oblivion.
Photograph by Games Press