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Pick Up and Play, Part 4: Alleyway

Marcel Pflug

Nov 7, 2023

4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Not every pick-up-and-play game needed a new idea. Some just took the oldest one in the arcade and made it fit in a pocket. Part four of Pick Up and Play is Nintendo's take on the game that has been quietly hypnotising players since the 1970s: bounce a ball off a bat and knock down a wall of bricks.

Game Boy Alleyway, Nintendo's launch brick-breaker — Bat, ball, bricks. The simplest fun on the whole system.

One bat, one ball, no thinking required

The appeal of Alleyway is that there is nothing to understand. You slide a paddle along the bottom of the screen, keep the ball in play, and chip away at the bricks above until they are gone. It is reflex, not strategy, which makes it the ideal thing to reach for when you have a single minute and no desire to think. There is no plot, no map and no save to worry about; you are simply trying to keep one ball alive a little longer than last time. That is a session you can start and end anywhere.

The one flicker of skill is in the angle. Hit the ball with the centre of the paddle and it comes straight back; catch it with the edge and you can send it slicing sideways to pick off an awkward corner, or punch a single gap and let it rattle around behind the wall clearing bricks on its own. Learning to steer like that is the difference between clearing a screen in one confident sweep and chasing a stray ball around for a nervous minute. It is a tiny bit of craft hiding inside a game that looks like it has none.

The game belongs to a lineage that stretches back to Breakout, the 1976 Atari classic whose prototype, as the legend goes, was hammered together by a young Steve Wozniak with Steve Jobs looking on. Taito's Arkanoid revived the formula in 1986 with power-ups and a proper spaceship paddle, and dozens of imitators followed. Alleyway is Nintendo's entry in that long tradition, and the reason the format has outlived a dozen console generations is exactly the reason it suits this series: the core loop is so clean it never needs updating. On the small green screen it feels right at home, quick and twitchy and endlessly repeatable.

A launch title with a hidden Mario

Alleyway is one of the original Game Boy launch titles from 1989, part of the small handful of games that first shipped with the console, and one of Nintendo's earliest attempts to give a plain brick-breaker an identity of its own. The way it did that is delightful once you notice it. The paddle is not a generic bar but a tiny spaceship belonging to Mario, and the bonus stages arrange their bricks into shapes drawn from the Mario universe, so a stripped-down arcade game quietly becomes a Nintendo one.

Those touches go further than the paddle. Clear certain screens and you drop into a bonus round where the bricks are laid out as characters and objects from the Mario world, giving you a few seconds to rack up extra points before the real game resumes. It is a small thing, but it is the whole difference between playing a generic brick-breaker and playing a Nintendo one, and it is the sort of detail that tells you the company was already thinking hard about how to stamp its personality onto even the simplest idea.

It arrived in very select company. When the Game Boy went on sale in Japan in 1989 its first cartridges numbered only a handful, and Alleyway was among them, sitting alongside the likes of Super Mario Land and Baseball as the games that introduced the world to the machine. To be one of the titles chosen to launch a console, even a modest brick-breaker, is a kind of honour, and it means Alleyway was in a great many of the very first Game Boy boxes ever opened.

As a launch game it also captures something about the Game Boy's first moments: the stripped-down, experimental spirit of a machine still working out what it was for. Sometimes the answer was an epic. Sometimes it was just a bat, a ball and five spare minutes, and that turned out to be more than enough.

That is why it earns its place here. Alleyway is not the deepest game on the shelf and never tried to be. It is the pure, portable distillation of an idea that was already old when the Game Boy was new, and it still does exactly what a spare minute asks of it: one ball, one wall, and nothing to leave unfinished.

To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.