Bounce a ball against a solid wall of dirt and watch it bore through, each hit carves a channel, so you literally dig your way to the clear.
Tunnelball is a brick-breaker reimagined against deformable terrain. Instead of tidy rows of bricks, a solid mass of ground fills the top of the screen. Launch the ball off your paddle and it tunnels through on contact, destroying cells and deflecting off their surfaces, gouging channels that widen the more you play. Keep the ball alive and dig until the level's goal is met.
Ball, paddle and a wall to demolish is Breakout, the 1976 game Steve Wozniak built the hardware for and Arkanoid later elaborated.
The change is the material. Instead of discrete bricks that vanish, the wall is solid dirt that the ball bores through, carving a channel as it goes.
That turns the genre's best-known tactic into its main one. Breakout players learned to punch a tunnel up the side and let the ball rattle along the top; here tunnelling is not a trick you discover but the substance of play, and the channel you dig is the thing you are steering.
Tunnelball is an original free browser game that rebuilds the paddle-and-ball brick-breaker around terrain you physically excavate rather than fixed bricks. Built in-house for PlayPendium.