Zoop is a puzzle video game originally developed by Hookstone and published by Viacom New Media for many platforms in 1995. It has similarities to Taito's 1989 arcade game Plotting (known as Flipull in other territories and on other systems) but Zoop runs in real-time instead. Players are tasked with eliminating pieces that spawn from one of the sides of the screen before they reach the center of the playfield. By pointing at a piece and shooting it, the player can either swap it with the current player color and thus arrange the same color pieces in a row or column, or match the color. A month before release, Zoop was one of four games played in the preliminary rounds of the Blockbuster World Video Game Championship II competition, a rare instance of an as-yet-unreleased game being used in a video game competition. The game was published for the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, DOS, Macintosh, PlayStation, Game Boy, Sega Saturn, and Atari Jaguar. Shortly after its release, to spark interest in the game, the SNES version was offered as part of a limited "rent one, get one free" promotion by Blockbuster. Gameplay Zoop is a real-time puzzle game, like Plotting, where the player controls a triangle in the center of the screen. Every second (or more often in advanced levels), a piece comes in from the side and possibly pushes other pieces forward. Two consecutive pieces will never come in from the same quadrant, and runs of consecutive identical pieces on one row are longer, statistically, than one might expect. If a piece falls into the center square, the game is over. If the player shoots a piece of the same color as their triangle, it will be "zooped" (cleared) and points are earned. If the piece behind the target piece is also of the same color, it is also "zooped". The same goes for the next piece, and so on. If a piece of a different color from the player's current piece is shot, the player's piece will switch colors with it. This is also what happens when a piece of a different color is encountered after zooping one or more pieces of the same color. When the quota of "zooped" pieces is met, the game speeds up, and (before level 10) the background changes. Various special pieces do different things, such as a proximity bomb (shaped