The Breaks originally were a group of high-rise condominiums built during the early days of the colony, located in the center of the business and entertainment community. Only the extremely wealthy had the means and the status to afford to live there, and the condominums eventually gained the exciting and often gossip-worthy reputation of housing models, movie stars, singers, playboy heirs of family fortunes, and many other visible figures who were constantly making the front page of the tabloids.

In AC 73 there were a series of mysterious deaths at the Breaks. Actress Kristen Zcialbik was found dead on the floor of her suite early one morning in March. Two days later, millionaire Joseph Steven Duncan was discovered with his throat cut in his bath. That same night, singer Alexander Jiang Wong collapsed at a party in the lobby and was taken to the hospital. When he arrived it was found that he had died of poisoning.

Rumors flew. It was quite obvious that the same person or group was behind these acts, but no evidence was discovered. There were no fingerprints, no signs that locks had been tampered with, and no reason to think that this was simply a result of hostility between rivals, since the three who were murdered were from seperate facets of society.

There were no more murders for almost a month after that and anxiety began to fade. But in early April 73, model Shi Takakara vanished from her suite without a trace. Her body was found mutilated in a nuclear waste yard in the industrial part of L1. The next morning, her lover Eric Vu was found on the balcony of his room with his heart cut out.

Within a month, the Breaks were deserted as inhabitants deemed it wise to move out before their lives were claimed next. The condominiums were left empty in the middle of downtown L1, simply left there for some reason or another. Plans were made several times to tear them down and build another builing in their place, but each time the mostly Japanese-descended government officials deemed it too risky to build any building on the site of former murders. For whatever the reason, the Breaks were still standing as the center of L1 gradually shifted further south at the beginning of the 90's, leaving them another monument of crumbling walls and broken glass in the midst of other deserted buildings.

As the government moved out, the dregs of L1 moved in. The former downtown became a shadowy hideout for criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes, and others who saw the broken buildings as perfect places in which to set up shop or to hide away. The Breaks themselves became the headquarters of the largest drug cartel on L1, headed by drug leader Shionji Hisashi, the youngest and most feared drug king in decades.

Gradually, the area around the former condominums became known as the Breaks themselves. Seedy bars, pawn shops, and casinos sprang up, covers for the drug deals and murders that took place behind closed doors. The crime rate soared and disease ran rampant. The government simply ignored the state of the Breaks, preferring to turn a blind eye towards it and to pretend it did not exist. As a result of this government negligence, the Breaks expanded rapidly. Prostitution and drug use ran wild. Assassin groups formed, selling their services to the highest bidder. Crime lords staked out territory in the shadows of derelict buildings and amassed their minions, building a mini-society of their own. By 121, even the bravest policeman skirted the Breaks and left the criminals to their own doings.

In 147, the Reform party won the elections of L1 for the first time since the colony was formed, and the new government decided it had had enough. It sent a team of specialized soldiers to infiltrate the Breaks and determine how it could be reclaimed by, as Vice Chairman Kaoru Toshi stated, "its rightful owners: the government and the people." The operation failed and all but one of the soldiers was killed. The surviving man escaped with a report of the Breaks that proved that the situation was indeed worse than the government had thought.

The team divided the area into five sections: four quarters and a middle section which consisted of the still-standing original high-rise buildings that gave the Breaks its name. The north section was the territory of various terrorist groups, crime lords, and minor drug cartels. The east section was primarily the hideout of assassins and gangs. In the west quarter were located the brothels, bars, casinos, and other small businesses that provided drug and other traffic. And the south quarter was the property of the two major drug cartels that ruled the Breaks: the Shionji cartel and the Black Diamond cartel. Six of the fifteen government team members had been killed attempting to infiltrate the Black Diamond cartel. Both groups were powerful, but the Shionji cartel was the dominant one, having held undisputed rule of the Breaks for almost fifty years.

In AC 173, Shionji Toburo, the son of Shionji Hisashi and the leader of the cartel, was murdered by an unknown assassin group and the Shionji cartel fell apart, victim to succession quarrels as one by one the successors themselves met various unfortunate ends. The Shionji cartel, which had been the first to claim any sort of ownership in the Breaks, had been the one constant in a violent atmosphere of change. In a way it had almost been an invisible government holding the microcosmic society together, and without its dominating influence the society of the Breaks began devolving into one enormous hole of violence and crime. By AC 174, the "sections" of the Breaks as drawn by the government infiltration team no longer existed. The leader of the Black Diamond cartel soon met the same end as his rival, and though the Black Diamond managed to hold itself together, it had not the influence or the reach of the Shionji cartel.

When Heero Yuy was assassinated in AC 175, the government turned its attention away from the Breaks completely, involved with more pressing matters. When they at last attempted to focus their eyes on the Breaks once again, after the war, they were surprised and dismayed to find that the boundaries of the area were slowly creeping outward. In the space of two decades, the Breaks had become a slums area as well as a crime ring, and its outer boundaries were composed of streets of makeshift housing where less fortunate citizens of L1, including former soldiers who returned to the colony to find their property and savings destroyed or reclaimed, were forced to relocate. A number of these soldiers, desperate for food and shelter, joined various crime organizations in order to make a living, many ironically losing their lives in the process.

By this time, the Breaks were more than one hundred years old; some of the crime organizations that controlled them even more so. Since the breakdown of the Shionji cartel there had been no one dominant group but instead a handful of organizations fighting for the top. In this crime war, groups could be born, grow powerful, and then vanish all in the space of a week.

A new addition to the battle for domination of the Breaks were the assassin groups. Former soldiers found these groups most attractive, for obvious reasons, and their ranks swelled massively at the end of the war. For the first time, assassin groups began abandoning their "anonymous" identity, emerging into the arena as a surprising and deadly force to be reckoned with. These groups could consist of a single assassin hiding behind a code name, or "guilds" or assassins, such as the Order of Knives Guild, which was the first to break the unwritten assassin law of secrecy and go head to head with the Black Diamond Cartel.

As of AC 197, the Breaks are the largest slums in the history of Earth or the colonies, and a blight on the colony of L1. The government has discussed myriad ways to rid the colony of this crime infested area, but short of sending in actual military troops to wage a full scale war against the slums, nothing will stop the Breaks from expanding and growing. Many have criticized the L1 government for failing to stop the Shionji Drug Cartel when it first established the crime area, to which the Reform government has replied: "The government of the past is not the government of the present. We of the new L1 administration have tried everything in our power to rid the colony of this blight which stains our history, but mistakes of the past prove difficult to correct in hindsight."