A History of Rage Quitting - Super Breakout

According to the Dev-Erhm... Gamespot. It's Video Game History Month. But instead of celebrating this month in a way I'm sure a lot of you are planning, we're going to be non-conformists and talk about the games that piss us off. You know the ones, where we shit our pants in anger and proceed to rage quit? Those are the ones we're going to look at. With a historical focus of course.

Today we're going to take a look at...

Super Breakout

The 1978 sequel to the original Breakout, which was brick-smashing phenomenon. Super Breakout brought us the Multi-ball option, which is now commonplace in every breakout clone, but was unique and likely a programming feat for the late 70's. The game started out in Arcades and made it's way home onto the Atari 2600, 8-bit and ST.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but why exactly does this game piss you off? Well, I have a story to tell you.

It was an innocent Sunday, unlike another, except for the hangover of course. I had a some extra Microsoft points laying about on my profile, so I decided to do what I'm best at: Spending money. The latest update for the Game Room had just been released, so I decided to look at some of the new games it had to offer. One of them was the arcade version of Super Breakout, suddenly $3 was taken away from me and Super Breakout popped up in my Arcade. I began to play it and here's what I saw.

Clearly this game isn't compensating for anything.

The paddle was incredibly small, eliciting a "What the fuck" to roll out of my mouth. I didn't think much of it, but little did I know what was going to happen. The ball began to fall and I moved my minuscule paddle towards it and... The ball missed. So I tried again, it was successful this time around, but then... It missed once more as the ball speed up to impossible speeds in only a couple hits. After trying this for almost 30 minutes, something hit me. Clearly this game was designed to piss me off. The knowledge of this let out the angry little prepubescent child in me.

In games room, you unlock medals for getting a certain number of points and lasting a certain period of time. to get the bronze medal, you need to survive two minutes. I still don't have that bronze medal. I'm naturally a pretty calm guy, the last time I can recall rage-quitting was when I was 15, playing Halo with several Xbox Live Tough Guys. But this, this was different. The game itself was taunting me, it needed to die. After tossing my controller to the floor, I proceeded to punch the Power button on the 360, scream all many of naughty words at the TV and gallop down the stairs like a 14-year old who's mad at her parents for not letting her binge drink tonight.

That my friends... Is called a Rage Quit. And for the sake of this article, I assure you, it won't be my last.

-Kyle K.