Brix

Brix is a 1997 Macintosh take on Breakout by Hugh Wilson. The bat-and-ball loop is familiar, but the brick wall is colour-coded into roles: yellow goal bricks must be cleared to advance, blue bricks score points but are optional, grey bricks are indestructible, and red and purple bricks act as bonuses or penalties.

How it plays

Each level is a puzzle in priority management. You only have to clear the yellow goal bricks, but blues raise your score, reds award extra lives or freeze the clock, and purples sting you with point penalties if you hit them.

Paddle feel

Brix exposes paddle velocity as an in-game setting through the Game menu, letting players tune how reactive the bat feels. That small touch sets it apart from the more rigid Breakout clones of the era.

Author

The game was written by Hugh Wilson and distributed as Mac shareware. It is preserved on Macintosh Garden as brix_v102.

Requirements

Brix needs a 68040 Mac running System 7.0 or later, 256 colours at 640x480, and about 2.5 MB of free RAM. It runs cleanly under 68k-capable emulators such as Basilisk II.