1. For me, the milestones in Breakout-like games were Impact (Audiogenic, BBC/Electron) - a pretty robust Arkanoid-style implementation - Ballarena (Systeme, Archimedes) - the two players move in a circle around the irregular, ray-traced blocks - and Oddball (Digital Psychosis, Archimedes) - the bat moves over a parallax scrolling map, steering the ball away from obstacles/traps and towards the blocks.
     posted by Paul Boddie at 06:35:14 AM on August 09, 2004  
2. Breakout, in BASIC on a TRS-80 was one of my early programming exercises - reimplementing it in a homebrew TIL (forth-like microlanguage) on the same machine and seeing vast speedup was one of my first experiences with interpreter performance issues :-)
     posted by Mark Eichin at 04:42:46 PM on August 09, 2004  
3. Krakout was always my favorite C64 breakout clone. The first time I played it I was all, "Heck yeah!"
   
   I remember being rather underwhelmed with Arkanoid.
   
     posted by Adam V. at 11:51:04 PM on August 09, 2004  
4. (I also remember a French CGA Breakout clone called "Popcorn" for the PC. It had severe timing issues on anything faster than a 286 though.)
   
     posted by Adam V. at 11:52:27 PM on August 09, 2004