In 1976, Atari had an idea: take Pong, stand it on its end, and put a wall of bricks at the top. Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow came up with the game. A young Atari technician named Steve Jobs got the job of building it, and he brought in his friend Steve Wozniak, who designed the whole thing in four sleepless days using as few chips as he could. Three Steves, one paddle, one wall of bricks. They called it Breakout.
Fifty years later, I gave the bricks a history lesson.
Every Brick Is a Battle
Battle Brick: Alexander the Great lines up twenty battles and sieges from 338 to 325 BC — Chaeronea, Thebes, the Granicus River, Issus, Tyre, Gaza, Gaugamela, the Persian Gate, the Sogdian Rock, the Hydaspes, and on to Multan. Knock out a brick and the victory goes into your Campaign Log, with the year it happened.
There is one rule you will not find in the Atari version. Miss the ball, and the game tells you exactly what you did: You just killed Alexander the Great. You lose.
There is only one level. No extra rounds, no bonus stage. That is the whole point — Alexander never lost a battle, and your students shouldn’t let him start now.
Overheard in the Computer Lab
A student sits down to play Battle Brick. Standing behind her chair: Alexander the Great, and the man he beat twice, King Darius III of Persia.
ALEXANDER: Chaeronea… Thebes… the Granicus. She’s good.
DARIUS: Come on, kid! You can do it! Go, go, go!
ALEXANDER: Since when do you cheer for me?
DARIUS: I’m not cheering for you. I’m cheering for her. Big difference.
The ball rockets toward the Battle of Issus.
DARIUS: Oh. Not that one. Anything but that one. Hey, kid — was that the bell?
ALEXANDER: You ran from Issus, you know. Left your chariot, your bow, your mother…
DARIUS: My mother liked you better anyway.
Crack. Gaugamela falls.
DARIUS: Twice. He beat me twice. Kid, that paddle looks heavy. Your arm must be tired. Rest it. Just for a second.
STUDENT: Mr. Darius, if I miss the ball, Alexander dies.
DARIUS: I know. I’m rooting for you.
ALEXANDER: He’s rooting for the ball.
The last brick — Multan — shatters. Twenty for twenty.
ALEXANDER: Undefeated.
DARIUS: Let her play again. Maybe this time she sneezes.
Before You Play: Meet Alexander
Battle Brick is the last stop in Introduction to Alexander the Great, my old Adobe Animate program rebuilt for the browser. Six panels walk students through his Legacy, his Family, his Strategies (and More Strategies), his Battles, and the famous Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii. Yes, there is a Far Side cartoon on the menu. Some habits from my bulletin-board days never die.
On the strategy pages, students don’t just read about siege engines — they load the ballista and fire at the walls of Tyre themselves. From the Battles page, one click takes them straight into Battle Brick, and when the game is over it sends them back to the program.
Free to play, no login, no membership, no fees. Just a paddle, a ball, and a king who never lost.
Leave a Reply