1999BREAKER is a brick-breaking game fused with a live music sequencer. Every brick you destroy adds a note to a looping melody. Every bounce earns a drum hit. The longer you play, the richer the track becomes.
It's a sister piece to the 1999ophone — a 3D voxel sequencer and theremin instrument also built by DJ 1999 / Jody Shenn. Play the 1999ophone at jodyshenn.com/1999ophone.
Drag anywhere on screen to move the paddle. The ball launches on your first touch. Don't let it fall off the bottom.
Break all the bricks to advance to the next level. Speed increases as you level up. You have 3 lives — lose them all and it's game over.
Tougher bricks require multiple hits to destroy — a small progress bar inside the brick shows how many hits remain. These are also the bricks most likely to contain power-ups.
Each brick column maps to a musical note. When a brick breaks, its note is added to the 8-step loop strip at the bottom of the screen. The loop keeps playing and growing as you break more bricks — by the end of a level you'll have built a full melody.
The loop strip is the row of 8 glowing cells just above the bottom buttons. Each cell is one step in the loop. Active steps light up in the color of the brick that unlocked them. A brighter flash on a cell means it just fired. A small white dot crawls along the bottom of the strip showing the current beat position.
Inside each strip cell you may see up to three tiny colored dots along the bottom edge — these are your drum hits for that step:
The more you bounce, the fuller the beat gets. Drum hits are placed randomly across the 4-step drum loop as you earn them.
SCALE button cycles through 6 scales: Pentatonic, Minor, Major, Blues, Dorian, Chromatic — instantly re-tunes all active loop notes. − / + adjusts BPM from 60 to 200. KIT cycles drum sounds: TRAP · HOUSE · JUNGLE · 808 · ELECTRO · MUTE.
About 10% of harder bricks are golden ★ bricks. Destroy one and a capsule drops — catch it with your paddle to activate:
Difficulty affects ball speed, paddle size, shrink rate, and starting lives. Takes effect on next game.
Destroy your 1999th brick across all levels and something special happens. We'll leave it at that.
A CREATION OF DJ 1999 / JODY SHENN