Super Breakout

Certainly the true 2600 fanatics know that there is in fact a backstory for Super Breakout. Astronaut, on a shuttle, in deep space, finds his ship suddenly trapped in a dense series of energy fields. His only hope of escape? The most radical spacewalk ever, for a high stakes game of interstellar ping pong. Good thing he packed a raquet. The shuttle graphic in this artwork is in fact from the shuttle Enterprise, which was the test vehicle flown piggyback during the later years of the shuttle's development. It was recently flown that way one last time on a farewell tour before occupying its permanent home in the Smithsonian. There's no mistaking the styling of the cockpit windows and the nose on that prototype shuttle. The side graphics are from scans of the in-store promotional displays for this cartridge. The energy fields are 3D modeled, screen captured, and then manipulated in GIMP. The center backdrop graphic involved mapping those energy field models onto a cylinder, to get that feeling of the shuttle being cocooned within them. Now if I could only get my hands on the official Atari Super Breakout vinyl record......