Blockout

The player's perspective is that of looking down into a three-dimensional rectangular pit. Polycube blocks of various shapes appear, one at a time, and fall slowly toward the bottom of the pit. The player can use three buttons to rotate the block around any of the three coordinate axes, and can also maneuver the block horizontally and vertically with the joystick. Once any part of a block comes to rest on the floor of the pit or in contact with an already-placed cube, the entire block freezes in place and can no longer be moved.

The player can press a button on the joystick to quickly drop a block. Once a solid layer of cubes is formed with no gaps (a "face"), it disappears and all cubes above it drop toward the bottom of the pit to fill the space. Completing multiple faces with a single block awards higher scores, and the player earns a "Block Out" bonus for emptying the pit. A set number of faces must be completed in order to end each round.

The New York Times reviewed the game in an article about educational software for mathematics, writing that Blockout "doesn't pretend to be educational, but the skills required to master it are not unrelated to mathematics, particularly geometry." A 1993 study found evidence that playing Blockout improved the spatial visualization ability of 10- to 14-year-olds.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Block Out on their March 1, 1990 issue as being the tenth most-successful table arcade unit of the month. It was released for the Sega Mega Drive in Japan on November 1, 1991.

Around 2007, a modernized, authorized continuation/remake named Blockout II was released with a license from Kadon Enterprises, to use the trademarked Blockout name. The game is open-source and was ported to many platforms the original wasn't available before, like Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu, and the OpenPandora handheld.

On February 19, 2008, an officially licensed crossover with Tetris titled Tetris Blockout was released by EA Mobile for mobile phones with authorization of both Blue Planet Software and Kadon Enterprises.