A year ago, it took Claude AI and me hours to build Asteroids; we just built a Breakout clone in five minutes — and you can play it

AI development is really breaking out

by · TechRadar

Features By Lance Ulanoff Published 14 August 2026

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I didn't set out to build a Breakout clone, but that's what I — or really Claude, under my direction — did, and it took less time than it takes to watch a half dozen cat videos.

Here's how it started. Claude was having issues. Anthropic's powerful and popular generative AI platform was apparently going up and down, and some were complaining, but when I checked, Claude told me, "I'm doing well, thanks for asking!" I realized, though, that if the problems were intermittent, I might need a tougher task to test Claude's overall stability.

More than a year ago, I worked with Claude, or rather guided Claude through the process of recreating the early 1980s arcade game classic: Asteroids. The final game, which Claude exported as a shareable artifact, was the product of hours of guidance and back-and-forth between me and the AI. It didn't start off great, but with each prompt, we iterated, and the game improved until I had a rather robust and true-to-the-original Asteroids knockoff.

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With that in mind, I tasked Claude AI, running the free Sonnet 5 model at "Medium" level, with creating a Breakout clone.

Breaking out

Breakout is one of my favorite games, something I've played on early consoles, PCs, and even my old BlackBerry, where "Brick Breaker" was one of the few preloaded games.

The game rules are pretty simple. There's a multi-level brick wall (usually eight bricks deep) at the top of the screen, a paddle at the base, and a bouncing ball you bounce off the paddle to break down the brick wall.

For my prompt, I tried to describe, in some detail, my game, and was not coy about it being an online version of Breakout:

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