Breakout

Breakout You haven’t played breakout until you’ve played it in all its low-resolution glory on the side of a building. Which is exactly what my wife, my brother-in-law, and I did in Toronto while we were visiting for Canadian Thanksgiving. The installation was part of project blinkenlights by the Chaos Computer Club. Every window in the city hall building had a lamp that would turn on or off to form a giant pixelated screen. You would call a number on a cell phone to start a game, then use the keypad to move the paddle around. Each game would last a minute, or in my case, the 10 secs it took to lose. Very neat!

(I think in this image, the ball is in the lower left corner and the dot above the paddle on the right is just an artifact. But I could be wrong — it could just be me losing, again.)