BlockOut

BlockOut is a computer game published in 1989 by the Polish programmer Alexander Ustaszewski and Mirek Zabłocki, which extended the principle of the classic game Tetris from two to three dimensions in an innovative way.

Gameplay

The player looks down from the top of a shaft with a rectangular floor plan. Three-dimensional, composed of several dice blocks appear at the top of the shaft and slowly falling down, during which they may be rotated by the player in all three axes spatial and laterally displaced. As in Tetris, the goal is, like a jigsaw puzzle to arrange the blocks in closed layers - when the layer is full, it disappears, and the overlying blocks slip. The game is over when the broken-down blocks reach the top of the shaft.

Blockout was published in 1989 by the California software company and California Dreams Rainbow Arts. It was the first official Tetris variant, which did not appear at Spectrum Holobyte. The name Blockout is a registered trademark of the computer game company Kadon Enterprises of Maryland.

Despite the high demands on spatial ability and the complicated control Blockout was commercially successful and has to this day a cult following, the tournaments organized and sought, among other reasons, the MS -DOS version of the game with modern graphics cards and Windows versions to error-free Running to bring.

The positive influence on spatial ability of young people (10 - to 14 -year-old ) was detected in 1993 in the framework of a scientific study. ( NOSS, 1994)

Official and unofficial versions of the game released for numerous platforms, including even for modern as Palm OS, Flash and Java.