Bounce the ball and clear every brick.

Brick Breaker is the classic arcade game where you bounce a ball off a paddle at the bottom of the screen to demolish all the bricks stacked at the top. The genre was born from Atari's 1976 "Breakout" and hit its golden age with "Arkanoid" in 1986, which introduced power-ups and multi-stage progression. Decades later it remains one of the most-cloned game categories ever — a rare combination of physics, angles, and reflex all running on a single simple rule.

The controls are two directions plus launch. Move the paddle left and right with mouse motion or arrow keys, hit launch to send the ball into play. Where on the paddle the ball lands determines its reflection angle, and steering the ball intentionally toward target brick clusters is the core skill. Miss the ball and you lose a life; when all lives run out, the game is over.

The single biggest trick for big scores and clears is "trapping the ball above the bricks." If you carve out a narrow vertical tunnel along one wall and send the ball through it, the ball bounces between the ceiling and the brick stack in an automatic chain that demolishes row after row — the "infinite combo zone." Most experienced players intentionally clear the leftmost or rightmost vertical column first to set up this trick. Hitting the ball at the paddle's edge produces a sharper angle, useful for emergency horizontal travel.

Score accumulates from bricks broken, remaining lives, and bonus pickups. Tougher bricks (multi-hit), explosive bricks, and bonus drops (longer paddle, multi-ball, lasers) appear in later stages and turn the run from pure reflex into a "which brick first" decision game. A round lasts 3 to 10 minutes — a clean unit for comparing clear times.

When you need to "smash stress away" in a quick window — commute, post-lunch, between tasks — this is the genre. Share your final score as a challenge link to see who clears more cleanly under identical rules. When the day calls for a classic with real tactile feedback, OgleOgle Brick Breaker is the answer.