At a book signing for his autobiography, iWoz, in 2006, Wozniak described the experience of making the game.
He said that a “simple game like Breakout” would only take “a half an hour” to program today, using software. At the time, though, creating the game would normally have been “a six-man-month-type job.”
Instead, he and Jobs did it in only four days. Four full days, that is. According to Wozniak, sleep was not an option. As Wozniak remembered it, “We went into Atari every night to work in the lab, and Steve would sit there with a wire-wrap gun, putting the wires on to wire my designs together. Something wouldn’t work, I’d come over, look at something; I’d figure it out, change the circuit; he’d redo it. And four days and nights we barely got any sleep at all. We both got mononucleosis from this. And we achieved it.”
In the end, they won the bonus money and the project was a great success. Breakout is considered to be a major moment in gaming history.
