Original Apple II personal computer cassette tape for containing “Color Demos” for the arcade game “Breakout,” which was released in 1977 and developed by Steve Wozniak. The green-and-white labels to either side bear faint stamps: “BREAKOUT, 1K” and “COLOR DEMOS, 1K.” A DAK label affixed to one side of the included cassette case is annotated in black ink, “BREAKOUT, COLOR DEMOS, A.” In fine condition.
Designed by Steve Wozniak in October of 1975, the arcade game Breakout was developed and published by Atari, Inc. and released on May 13, 1976. In the game, a layer of bricks lined the top third of the screen, and the goal was to destroy them all by repeatedly bouncing a ball off a paddle into them. Breakout was a worldwide commercial success, among the top five highest-grossing arcade video games of 1976 in both the United States and Japan and then among the top three highest-grossing arcade video games of 1977 in the U.S. and Japan.
Wozniak later claimed that Breakout directly influenced the design of the Apple II computer, saying ‘A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now.’ This included his design of color graphics circuitry, the addition of game paddle support and sound, and graphics commands in Integer BASIC. ‘Basically, all the game features were put in just so I could show off the game I was familiar with—Breakout—at the Homebrew Computer Club. It was the most satisfying day of my life [when] I demonstrated Breakout—totally written in BASIC. It seemed like a huge step to me. After designing hardware arcade games, I knew that being able to program them in BASIC was going to change the world.’
