Blockdot

Blockdot is a defunct branded entertainment and game studio based in Dallas, Texas, United States, that built many of the games for Microsoft's Club Bing.

History

Blockdot was founded in March 2001 by Michael Bielinski, Dan Ferguson, and Jason McMinn. In August 2005, it was purchased by Media General.[1] By 2016, the company was no longer in business.[2]

Dan Ferguson has gone on to co-found a new that makes games called Groove Jones. Groove Jones is well known in the XR industry for creating award-winning VR and AR experiences for brands. They continue to make games.

Games
  • Banana Shuffle: players transform one word to another by changing one letter at a time.
  • Chicktionary: a variation on the game of Anagrams, it features an egg rack, replete with three to seven-letter sequences of eggs. Seven chickens appear at the bottom, each bearing a letter. When the player clicks on a hen, its letter is dropped into a box. Clicking on three or more hens in sequence can create a word. If it is a valid word, a sequence of eggs of the appropriate length will be filled up with the word. The game increased Microsoft's share of the search market increased by 13.2% in June 2007.[3][4]
    • Spelling Bee: similar to Chicktionary, players are given seven letters from which to form words
    • Word Slugger: similar to Chicktionary, players are given seven letters from which to form words
  • Clink: phrase-matching game
  • Coffee Break: sampler consisting of short versions of Chicktionary, Crosswire, and Clink
  • CrossWire: items on one side must be matched to corresponding items on the opposite side.
  • Dingbats: players solve a puzzle and may guess letters, similar to hangman.
  • Discover the World with Matt Lauer: world trivia game with 8 questions per game
  • Flexicon: crossword-like game
  • Quote a Pillar: players spell out famous quotes using the letters provided.
  • Red Carpet Reveal: celebrity trivia game
  • Seekadoo: word search
  • Taxi Wrangler: time management game consisting of three rounds
  • Time Capsule: daily question of events related to present day in history
  • Trivia Bound: multiplayer trivia contest consisting of five rounds of questions. Players score points by inputting answers that rank the highest on a Bing search query
  • Truffula Shuffula: the official game of the 2012 movie The Lorax
gollark: The new protocol is CBOR-based so I changed it.
gollark: ```local CBOR_path = _G.skynet_CBOR_path or "cbor.lua"local a=http.get"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/osmarks/skynet/master/cbor.lua"local b=fs.open(CBOR_path,"w")b.write(a.readAll())a.close()b.close()local CBOR = dofile(CBOR_path)```
gollark: Fixed it.
gollark: Not in CCEmuX for me either; weird.
gollark: I'll make it not do that, regular getmetatable should be fine.

References
  1. STEPHANIE STOUGHTON (2005-08-16). "Media General Buys 'advergaming' Business". AP Online/HighBeam Research. Archived from the original on 2016-02-24. Retrieved 2012-08-07.
  2. "Glassdoor review of company: ""Was great company, no longer in existence.""". Glassdoor. 26 April 2016. Retrieved 19 September 2019.
  3. Associated Press (2007-07-19). "'Chicktionary' Game Helps Microsoft Boost Search Ratings", Fox News.
  4. Blockdot (2008-04-15). "Blockdot Game Portfolio Archived 2010-07-30 at the Wayback Machine", Blockdot.
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