Well, we can once again thank Google for ruining our productivity. This time, the famous search engine celebrates the 37-year-old classic Breakout, which tasked players to destroy a bunch of blocks by bouncing a small ball around the screen. Yeah, it was a simpler time.

You can play the Google version by searching for images of “Atari Breakout.” This clever take on the breakout (ha) arcade hit uses the image search results as its blocks. Clear them all and you’ll move on to new levels that use more random pictures, like adorable chinchillas or pancakes.

Thanks to Reddit user Techchris, whose post originally alerted us to this awesome Easter egg.

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Atari said tonight it has filed for bankruptcy protection as part of a move to separate from its French parent company.

The filing suggests that even the most venerated brands aren’t guaranteed to live forever. Atari’s name stretches back to the dawn of the video game industry with Pong. We’ve heard that Atari has been shopping itself to buyers for months.

The move is an attempt to carve out a separate existence for the U.S. company. The filing includes companies operating under the names Atari Inc., Atari Interactive Inc., Humongous, Inc., and California US Holdings, Inc. The papers were filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. The company, founded by Nolan Bushnell in 1972, expects to continue operations during the bankruptcy proceedings.

“With this move, the U.S.-based Atari operations seek to separate from the structural financial encumbrances of their French parent holding company, Atari S.A. (formerly Infogrames S.A.) and secure independent capital for future growth, primarily in the areas of digital and mobile games,” the company said in a press release.

Atari has been in dire straits before and it has changed hands a few times. The company split into an arcade division and a consumer electronics division in 1984. Jack Tramiel’s Tramel Technology bought the consumer division, renamed Atari Corp. In 1998, Hasbro Interactive acquired the Atari Corp. business, renaming it Atari Interactive. Infogrames bought Hasbro’s video game business in 2001 and renamed the entire company as Atari Interactive in 2003.

Within the next three to four months, Atari expects to sell all of its assets in a ”sale free and clear” under section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code. The assets include the Atari brand logo, which is familiar to 90 percent of Americans, but also the legendary game titles including Pong, Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Battlezone and Tempest. Other recognized brands include Test Drive, Backyard Sports, and Humongous.

Atari has shifted from retail games to digital games and licensing. It has focused on developing mobile games based on some of Atari’s franchises. Altogether, Atari has more than 200 game properties. Atari says it is producing profits for its French parent, Atari S.A.

Atari’s newest mobile games include Atari Greatest Hits, Outlaw, Breakout, and Asteroids Gunner.

The U.S. entities want the court to approve $5.25 million in debtor-in-possession financing from one or more funds managed by Tenor Capital Management, a firm specializing in convertible arbitrage and special situations.

Peter S. Partee, Sr. and Michael P. Richman of Hunton & Williams LLP will serve as lead counsel in the bankruptcy filing.

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Industry vets Martin Goldberg and Curt Vendel have penned a comprehensive history of the retro gaming juggernaut, Atari, in time for the 40th anniversary of the interactive, table-tennis classic, Pong. The book is called “Atari Inc. — Business is Fun.”

Previous accounts associate Atari with its laid-back culture – the lax dress codes, hot tub meetings, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. And you’re probably familiar with the company’s seminal contributions to the early histories of video gaming … Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Tempest, Centipede, etc.

You’re probably also aware of Atari’s principle responsibility for the great video game crash of 1983 via an adorable alien named E.T. 3.5 million unsold units, a $1.3 billion loss in market valuation, and a New Mexico landfill later, and one of the great video game cautionary tales was born.

But the book goes beyond all the facts and figures to focus on the people who made this early ‘70s zeitgeist such a success. Basically – what was it like to work for a company “whose sole intent was to create FUN for a living”?

According to Vendel, “This book will dispel … and maybe also ‘confirm’ numerous rumors by giving readers that front row, first person experience.”

This 800-page tome – over seven years in the writing – contains 300 pages (yes, 300 pages) of previously unseen photos and is available from Amazon right now.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sailor Ben isn’t your ordinary kind of teddy bear. If his thick, scowling unibrow and the heart tattooed on his chest don’t tip you off, the bandaged stump where his right leg once was certainly will. Oh, and he also has a bit of a drinking problem (don’t worry, it’s just root beer).

The teddy bear amputee is just one of the colorful Super Critters you’ll play as in Atari’s Super Bunny Breakout, the latest iteration of the developer’s Breakout series of games that started with the original arcade release in 1976. Published by Zynga as part of the Zynga Partners for Mobile program, Super Bunny Breakout retains the same basic concept of smashing things with a ball but blends it with characters and a storyline that wouldn’t look out of place in a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s “coming soon” for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch for $0.99 and hitting Android devices at a later date.

You start off as Rodney the bunny, who (as the teaser trailer reveals) frees himself from his cage and goes on a crusade to rescue the countless other animals in the E.A.T. (Evil Animal Testing) Labs. At first, he will serve as your “ball,” and in true brick-breaking tradition, you’ll have to ricochet him off of walls and the moving platform you control to smash all the objects in a level. Peppered throughout the stages are helpless animals still trapped in their cages. If you want to earn the top score (represented by three stars) and receive a large payout of coins, you’ll have to save them all.

Breaking away from tradition

Sometimes these levels contain other Super Critters, such as Sailor Ben, and after you free them, they permanently join Rodney as part of your roster. Each of them come with their own backstory and reason for being at the labs — illustrated with funny storyboard cutscenes — as well as special powers that you can activate by double-tapping the screen while they’re in the air. Rodney swirls around to punch everything in sight, Sailor Ben shoots a cannon ball, Pickles the cactus unleashes its pointy spines, and the cute Marshmallow Twins super-size themselves for extra damage. You can only use these attacks when your rainbow-colored energy bar is at full capacity; once empty, it’ll just regenerate over time.

Mechanically, one of the biggest changes to the Breakout formula is the fact that you can move the platform up and down (to a certain height) in addition to the usual horizontal motion. This allows you to fling the ball as hard as you want as it drops back down, and levels can quickly resemble a hectic game of pinball as you try to catch the fast-moving critters bouncing off at every angle.

Source: Wikipedia

The Atari 2600 version of Breakout

Instead of losing lives when the ball drops to the bottom of the screen, you lose health points (the green bar in the gallery below). If your critters’ health reaches zero, you’ll immediately fail the level; you can choose to wait for their health to slowly refill over time, or you can buy things to feed them with. This is all done in the Tree, a place where you can check on the status of your animals, browse the in-game shop, and spend the coins you collected from completing the stages. Cheaper food will heal a lower amount of health points than the more expensive options, and you’ll need a total of 1,000 points to refill the bar completely.

You can also buy a variety of power-ups, like the Anti-Gravity ability that helps keep the ball in the air, as well as furniture to decorate the Tree. If earning coins is too slow for you, you can purchase optional coin packs that start from $0.99.

Keeping things fresh

Super Bunny Breakout will have 48 levels at launch — with plans to add more via updates and in-app purchases — organized into different sections like Lab 1 and Lab 2, each with its own distinct themes. Some of the levels I played operated like a factory, with conveyor belts transporting caged animals across the screen, while others contained beakers and pots filled with chemicals that slowed my platform’s movement with viscous goo. Even if you manage to never drop the ball, the environmental dangers can strip away your health if you don’t avoid them in time.

A few levels act as bonus missions and tweak the Breakout gameplay in different ways. The one I saw played like a billiards table, where you had to knock the colored rings into the designated “pockets.” You can’t lose health while playing them, and they’re useful for trying to collect any extra coins.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Atari

The Atari Go initiative will take games created by others and publish them using the company’s existing online games infrastructure. Thom Kozik, head of the business-to-business initative, said in an interview that the company is tapping the infrastructure it inherited when it bought Cryptic Studios at the end of 2008. Cryptic makes and publishes massively multiplayer online games such as Star Trek Online and Champions Online.

Over the years, Cryptic has built infrastructure such as billing systems and customer service. The team of experts in that part of Cryptic’s business amounts to more than 100 people. Now the company can leverage that expertise as it publishes games through Atari Go. Atari is the legendary brand that created games such as Breakout and Pong. But it has gone through ownership changes over the years and is now a relatively small company surrounding by a bunch of larger game companies such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard.

But with the Cryptic talent, Atari figures it has assets that give it an advantage.

“We already know how to take a game online and scale it up,” Kozik (pictured) said.

One of the first new games that Atari has published is Fairies vs. Darklings, a social casual online game. Kozik said Atari is talking to more than a dozen parties about publishing online games. Some of those will be original works, such as Faeries vs. Darklings, and others will use Atari’s classic brands.

There are already a lot of imitation Atari games posted around the web, and those games draw audiences by the tens of millions. Kozik said his company will work on “re-imagined” classic titles and try to lure those gamers away from imitations to the real thing. Atari’s platform will help developers reach new audiences via various friend networks, since the discovery of content is a key problem in the mobile world, Kozik said. Atari will also provide analytics information in addition to marketing and distribution.

Kozik, who joined Atari as executive vice president of online and mobile in March, has more than 25 years of experience in games. He has played leadership roles at Microsoft, Yahoo, Bigpoint and K2 Network. His goal is to work with talented independent developers to build games that can reach a wider audience through Atari. You can imagine the sales pitch: We know you like Asteroids, so you should try this new game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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