It probably made a lot of sense to bring Block Out to the NES.

When American Technos announced its intention to release the game at the 1990 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the video game industry was in the middle of a mini goldrush for puzzle games, thanks to the monster success that was Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris.

And Block Out wasn't just any old puzzle game; it, too, came out of an exotic Soviet Union that Americans were still fascinated by. That one-two punch made it an obvious marketing win.

Blockout was originally designed as a home computer game by Russian mathematician Alexander Ustaszewski, and distributed through publisher California Dreams. It plays like a 3D version of Tetris, but in a grid insead of a straight line, and with way more complicated pieces (Tetris has seven; Blockout has forty-one).

The NES version is actually based on Technos' own arcade rendition of the original, which added new features like a two-player competitive mode and a character in the mysterious (and kind of annoying) Block Master, who taunted you between levels.

A prototype of the NES version was randomly found at a Goodwill by game collector Jim Cook. This is, as far as we're aware, one of two prototypes of the game that still exist and it is, in the estimation of the other one's owner, the more complete of the two. Fellow collector Steve Lin was generous enough to acquire the game for $2,000 in a public auction in 2012 and release the ROM to the masses.

SOURCE: The Lost Levels - click for more info!

Block Out - Unreleased NES Game Prototype[/align:1143vhr0]