Breakout is one the early years' most well-known games. Right next to things like Pac-Man, Asteroids and Space Invaders. Back in the day, games like that would get hundreds of clones, and Nintendo made one of them; Alleyway. It's a simple game, and has a few extra features over the original, but the concept is the same. When I was a kid, I had a GameBoy that I always took with me on our three week family vacation to southern France, a type of vacation that every self-respecting Dutch family apparently has to do. Some, well, probably most, families do this every year for as much as two decades, but we got bored of it after three of those trips. Anyway, I took my GameBoy, a transparent one, with me and I had a couple games for it. Donkey Kong Land, which was too difficult for me, some Daffy Duck game which was fine I guess, Tennis, which was fun but I got frustrated too much, and Alleyway. Alleyway was just right, and while I was supposed to sit on a beach, I just played this game until the batteries ran out.
Another one of those classics is Missile Command. While this game from before my time, I do have a history with this game. In the early days of computers, and we got our first home computer, there were plenty of CD's out there that came with magazines and whatnot, and they often included some small and obscure games. It was the way indies distributed their stuff back then. A lot of those indie games were clones of well known arcade games, or at least, I never knew of the originals. I took a particular liking to a clone of Missile Command, that had nice sprites for each city on the ground that resembled real cities around the world. Particularly memorable about that however was, when you went 'game over', a sound clip played that screamed "Game Over Man, Game Over!" at you. I would later find out that this was taken from the movie Aliens. Much later, I started re-buying certain games that were in my family at one point in the past and also some things we never had. One of those things was the Atari 2600, and I found that the original Missile Command, is just as fun if not even more than the clone.
