Atari Breakout breaks in to Google Images - and reminds us how brilliantly simple the original computer games were

It’s hard to enthuse about the joys of Atari Breakout - or any other video game from the medium’s embryonic era - without sounding like a pub bore bemoaning the fact that kids today don’t even know they’re born while nursing a half of mild.

And yet...

With gamers currently salivating at the thought of the next generation of consoles, Google’s latest easter egg is a deeply nostalgic throwback to a time when the only people who used Xboxes were chicken farmers with a lisp.

Type the words ‘ATARI BREAKOUT’ into the search box on Google Images and watch in wonder as the mosaic of images form the coloured rows of bricks so indelibly etched into the memories of gamers of a certain age.

Co-developed by one of the medium’s founding fathers, Nolan Bushnell, and Steve Bristow for Atari, the game itself is an object study of simplicity. An attempt at producing a one-player version of seminal tennis-a-like Pong, Breakout turned the playing area on its side and replaced your opponent’s bat with a brick wall.

And that, pretty much, was that.

Nowadays, of course, entire teams of marketing graduates would spin out a complex backstory involving aliens, soldiers, large-breasted damsels in distress or some convoluted combination of the three.

The process of repeatedly bouncing a ball off a wall would be spun into a metaphor for the futility of modern existence. Ubiquitous video game actor Nolan North would be signed up to give the ball some gravel-voiced gravitas. And it would be in 3D.

(See? I’m about a paragraph away from remarking how it was all fields around here once. And I actually LOVE modern video games and their brainless but brilliant excess.)

Inevitably, over the years, people did try to embellish Bushnell and Bristow’s already perfect recipe.

Taito’s 1986 arcade effort Arkanoid was a personal favourite on account of its power ups (a sticky bat! Multiple balls! A LASER GUN!) and the fact it had an end of level boss called DOH (yes, Taito decided Breakout needed a backstory after all).

Other versions introduced multiplayer and, brilliantly, griefing (the ability to reverse your opponents’ controls was a masterstroke) and yet, as Google have proved, the primal appeal of bashing bricks with a ball endures.

So put down Call of Duty, take a break from Bioshock Infinite and have a bash at Breakout. Just don’t make any plans for the rest of the afternoon.