Breakout. Space Invaders. Bricks. Arkanoid.
All variations of the essential same game. You control a bat, move it left and right, and bounce a ball off a wall of bricks. Break all the bricks and move to the next level. Goodies occasionally fall from the broken bricks, which can do stuff like make the bat bigger, give additional balls, additional lives, make the bat sticky… and much more.
Frankly, I never got the hang of this, despite trying in earnest. The level of hand-eye co-ordination required is immense, and there are folks who are excellent at playing this game, or one of its variants. I am not one of them.
Still, in the early days when games were very hard to come by, and they were few and far between, this was played as a breather from the more interesting and complex games on offer.
Interesting tidbit: The game “Breakout”, the oldest variant of the theme, was first designed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.