Et in Arcade Ego
Which ponders on my breaking the all-time world record of a nearly forgotten video game.
I have never been good at, nor interested in, playing competitive sports (and I am mainly not interested in them because I am not good at them). Given my utter lack of physical dexterity and cutthroat competitiveness, my only redeeming quality has always been my slow, tortoise-like, obsessive perseverance, which was rewarded last week after I managed to reach the world record of the almost extinct game made famous during the Blackberry era, Brick Breaker.
My teens coincided exactly with the golden age of arcade games. In the early 80s, my brother and I became somewhat addicted to Pac-Man and Space Invaders. There were a couple consoles in the pharmacy around the corner of our house in Mexico City’s Colonia Nápoles (on the corner of Rochester and Pennsylvania streets), and we would go there almost every day after school to play either game, with a handful of 5-peso coins (about 25 cents at the time). Atari games were popular among my classmates and many of them had one at home; we only managed to get the Mexican version at home, Nesa Pong.
Pocket arcade games, created by Nintendo under the “Game and Watch” label, which also emerged in the early 80s, were a game-changer (pun intended) for us. One of those handheld games was simply titled “Fire” and consisted of two firemen holding a stretcher as people were falling from a burning building; the goal was to bounce all the falling people onto an ambulance. The amounts of falling people would increase substantially as the game progressed, resulting in many hours of obsessive coordination.
I did not think again about arcade games until about 2007, when I, always late to technology, got a Blackberry (precisely when it already was being quickly displaced by the first iPhone). The rudimentary game apps preloaded in the Blackberry included Brick Breaker, which is a fairly simple game consisting of a paddle and a bouncing metal ball that is used to break a series of brick walls. Throughout the course of the game, different capsules descend from the ether giving you temporary powers, such as a gun that can break metal bricks, a laser gun that can destroy regular bricks faster, one that multiplies the balls, and one that gives you an extra life. A misleading capsule titled “Flip” makes the paddle move in the opposite way you tell it to, which is generally catastrophic at key moments.
The game has 34 levels, becoming more and more challenging and fast-paced as the levels increase. Like millions of other players, I became addicted to the game. One day, however, in the height of frustration, angry with myself and the absurdity of my addiction, I deleted the game.
Fast forward to 2019, when looking at the App Store in a recently purchased iPhone I saw there was a Brick Breaker version for iOS. I downloaded it, just for fun and for old time’s sake. This time I became determined to make it through all 34 levels. It felt like a journey through terra incognita as I entered each level with new and odd challenges: metallic brick walls, descending rows that made the ricocheting of the ball really dangerous and would result in lives lost, etc. As I was amidst the Sisyphean process of reaching that level, I found a Brick Breaker guide by an expert named Pierre Bastien. The guide, created back in 2010, does not appear to have been updated much for the last decade. Like an arcade (arcadian?) Virgil, Pierre goes into detail in every level to offer tips and tricks to get you through the challenges of each. In that Brick Breaker guide, which is basically a blog, you can surmise that the majority of the comments are likely by teenagers or college students— most of them describing their experiences, thanking Pierre for his help and sharing their successes. I remember one of them ridiculing the game saying “I made it through the first levels, dead easy. Anyone who tries to go beyond level 5 needs to get a life.”
Pierre shared two crucial things – a suggestion and a piece of information- that I took to heart: first , that the key was survival, meaning that I needed to gain as many lives as possible. The piece of information was that once you reach the mysterious level 34 twice, which Pierre esoterically called “the turn”, the ball starts moving slower permanently, making it possible “to rack up your score as high as you want.”
So, acting as someone who needed to get a life, I continued playing after reaching “the turn”. My objective was survival, so I sought to accumulate as many lives as possible. After a few months, I noticed that my numbers were getting close to those included in the leaderboard (the lowest high scores being around 250,000 points). I reached leaderboard levels sometime after a year of playing. I played every day, with some periods being more intense than others (the pandemic became a period where I did spend quite some time on Brick Breaker).
Every six months or so I checked Pierre’s top score leaderboard, and sometimes I would find that someone had submitted an even higher top score, which pushed the goal posts even further for me. But since I am not a teenager in a hurry but a typically stoic Gen-Xer, as well as one of the most stubborn human beings on the planet accustomed to make durational-based works, I became determined to stay on task: breaking the Brick Breaker world record would be endurance art, mixed with a bit of theater of the absurd.
Was my conceptual art commitment a way to rationalize my addiction? In truth it became more of a meditative routine to me. While I had to hone my skills to increase my score and my lives, soon the game got fairly predictable and even tedious, as I started playing it while doing other activities, my hands working in autopilot while I could listen to podcasts or even have Zoom conversations. The more automatic the process became, the more it got closer to a Flow mindset, or even closer, to doodling: a physical scape valve that allowed me to actually focus on other intellectual activities.
That was also when my mind, always drawn to the visual/framing context, started wandering and reflecting on the ludic aesthetics — that is, the atmospherics and the stage setting which provides the emotional landscape of the entire game. There may be a bit of 80s nostalgia in it for me, but in any case it is recurrent. For example, I recalled when I briefly got addicted, for a month or so, with the game “Dots” (it didn’t last long before the levels got too hard and I gave up playing) I particularly loved the sound design, which was a strange but mesmerizing combination of elevator music, soft Fox-Trot, and Bossa Nova, created by Upright T-Rex Music, a duo comprised of Ross Wariner and Cody Uhler. While it has been years since I played the game, I still remember the music and the oddly enjoyable state of mind to which it brought me.
I turned to Mary Flanagan, the renowned game theorist and artist, author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design, to help me understand both the history of Brick Breaker and my novice questions about gaming aesthetics. Her reply: “Brick Breaker is a souped-up version of super breakout, which is a souped-up version of the 1972 game Pong. These are very minimalist games, so despite the addition of 90s clubbing music [ note: see versions such as Idle Brick Breaker], I don't think the atmosphere or aesthetic visually in this case really drives the urge to play as does the physics system and its own aesthetic, as well as the feedback of the game system. This use of the physics system dates back to one of the first computer games ever, Tennis for Two, in 1958 by Higinbotham and Dvorak.”
I thought of a really key piece of the early aughts, created right in the height of the new media art movement: Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002). In that piece, Arcangel simply removed the characters (Super Mario, his brother Luigi and their enemies), the moving platforms, the mushroom power-ups and all the other elements in the game just leaving the blue-sky background with the moving clouds. It is a piece that strips down all the aspects that make the game a game, leaving the backdrop as the only element; a Brechtian-like technique of fourth-wall underscoring, as well as a postmodern, meta reflection on the construction of fictions.
Flanagan has explored the “poetics of gaming” in her 2015 essay Playful Aesthetics: Toward a Ludic Language. And in her own work, and in particular one titled “Pile of Secrets”, from 2011-2013, with methodical fashion, Flanagan sought to create a morphology of sorts of gaming, exploring, in her words, “tropes across games that have become part of the presumed semiotic representation of realities in games. Videos in that work include "corridor," 'treasure," "key," and 'jumping' because these are things so many videogames have.” All of which makes me think of the connection between these games and the structure of fairy tales, all of them formed around specific narrative models and cultural typologies that we inhabit while playing them, a step beyond the passive role of reader.
As I kept getting higher and higher on my score, the competitive aspect of the game or even the prospect of reaching the world record became not as rewarding to me as its meditative qualities. I played the game at airports, in waiting rooms, on the subway, in cabs, whenever I was in a situation where I needed to kill time. The last goal post was 56,937,370, submitted by Dewey, “retired as champion” (there is a higher score submitted by a certain Johanna of 2 billion points, but that was discarded as falsified by the community as it would take 300 years to reach that many points).
On July 1, 2024, after nearly 5 years of playing the same game daily, this aging Gen Xer finally reached and surpassed that number. As of this writing my score reaches 57,160,860, with 37,013 lives.
I excitedly wrote to Pierre, sending along the screenshot of my achievement, as winners are required to do. I also wrote to Ali Asaria, the original Canadian developer of the game, and to Solomon Sapiro, the developer for the iPhone app version. But so far no one has gotten back to me. The developers likely have more important things to do than dealing with an old app. And the community of teenage and college-age players who were addicted to the game back in 2010 are likely now professionals in their 30s, some fast approaching middle age and probably dealing with a whole set of other responsibilities like having an office job, paying down mortgages and raising families— having a life.
Attaining the high score and realizing that there was no one to share it with since the Brick Breaker community has long been a ghost town made me feel a bit like the main character of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, who arrives to the town of Comala in search of his father and at some point realizes that everyone he is talking to is a ghost.
Then again, I recognized that this is ultimately the condition of art making with a historical consciousness: we send a message into a void to those (dead artists) who can’t possibly respond (as well as to those who have not arrived yet and might reply when we ourselves are no longer there). I also thought of other contemporary media artists like Angela Washko, who has entered into a variety of semi-abandoned gaming environments such as Second Life and others to play the game in her own way and effect a form of gaming institutional critique, for example under the guise of her The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft; in her telling, “I stopped playing the game “normally” and began traveling to major towns to discuss the oppressive ways in which women were treated in the game-space with other players.”
Given the phantasmagorical condition of this game, I decided I might as well make the best of it. So my small conceptual tribute in this case will be to create a Brick Breaker mood room— an immersive installation/period room that evokes the spirit of this obsolete arcade game. It will be dedicated to the next person that beats my world record in this virtual ghost town, and rededicated to the one that beats them next and so on: Think of it as The Brick Breaker Stripped Bare by its Last Player, Even.