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Marble Madness is an arcade game by Atari Games released in 1984. Using trackballs, players race marbles through an isometric Escher-esque labyrinth against a strict time limit. While Marble Madness is a fairly short game, with victorious plays through its six levels rarely lasting longer than five minutes, its high degree of challenge and charming theme, sound and graphics made it a hit. The game can be played solo, or by two players competing against each other. The game is harder with two players, so to compensate each player is allowed to continue the game once, and receives bonus time for beating the other player to the finish line. In single player mode, the player can use both trackballs at once, allowing more-rapid changes of direction.
After the first training level, called "Practice," the player is given an amount of time to maneuver through five successively harder levels: "Beginner," "Intermediate," "Aerial," "Silly" and "Ultimate." Time from previous levels is carried over to the next, with modest additional awards granted at the start of each one.
A small assortment of enemies are scattered through the levels, but the player's greatest foes are the levels themselves, which contain many sudden drops and treacherous passages.
This was the first Atari System 1 game; it was also the first video game with true stereo sound, featuring music composed by Brad Fuller and Hal Canon and instrument design by Earl Vickers.
Ports
The game was ported to various home computers and video game consoles. There is also an Unreal Tournament 2003 mod. An emulated version of the arcade game is available on Midway Arcade Treasures for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox. Despite the plethora of ports, few of these systems support trackball controllers, so an authentic Marble Madness experience is now extremely rare. Fans of the game hope that the Nintendo Wii will support Marble Madness with its motion sensor. Rolling Madness 3D is a OpenGL remake.
A few ports for personal computers were made by Electronic Arts, the best of which seemed to be the Amiga version. Both Commodore 64 and Apple IIe versions had a secret level called the Water Maze which you could get to by being on the leftmost bottom platform of the first level at a certain time (13 seconds). The Water Maze looked cool, but it was merciless... one mistake and you lost instantly.
Similar games have been produced for other platforms, such as Marble Blast, Marble Blast Ultra and Spindizzy.
Electronic Arts (1986)
Image:C64_Marble_Madness.png|C64
Electronic Arts (1986)
Image:Amiga_Marble_Madness.png|Amiga
Electronic Arts (1986)
Image:ST_Marble_Madness.png|Atari ST
Electronic Arts (1986)
Image:Marble_Madness_GS.gif|Apple IIGS
Electronic Arts (1988)
Image:NES_Marble_Madness.png|NES
MB/Rare (1989)
Image:GB_Marble_Madness.png|Game Boy
Mindscape (1991)
Image:SMS_Marble_Madness.png|Sega Master System
Virgin Games (1992)
Sequel
In 1991, a sequel, Marble Madness 2: Marble Man, was in development. Reportedly the first round of playtesting of a very rough prototype did not yield an extremely favorable response, and Atari at that time was only interested in producing games they expected to be big hits. Marketing believed the problem was that kids didn't like trackballs, so they had the engineers replace them with joysticks. This caused the next round of playtesting to have substantially worse results. Most of the few surviving cabinets have joysticks.
Marble Man ROM dumps (joystick version) and a driver for the MAME emulator exist, but are not publicly available at this time due to restrictions that were placed on the purchase of the machines from which the dumps were made.
External links
- Marble Madness Homepage Unofficial Marble Madness homepage.
- Information about Marble Madness from the MAME emulator pages
- The KLOV entry for Marble Madness
- Trackballs, a marble madness clone running under Linux and Windows.
- Supergerball, a commercial game based on a similar idea
- Hamsterball, another commercial game
- Rolling Madness, a 3D remake of Marble Madness
- NEOMarble, a similar 3D game including level editor
1984 arcade games | 1984 computer and video games | Amiga games | Amstrad CPC games | Apple II games | Apple IIGS games | Arcade games | Atari arcade games | Atari ST games | Commodore 64 games | Game Boy Color games | Game Boy games | Game Gear games | Mobile phone games | NES games | PC games | Racing computer games | Sega Master System games | Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis games | ZX Spectrum games
"Marble Madness"