What (who) is Zoop - definition

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.