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| Marble Madness |
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| | Developer(s) | Atari Games | | Publisher(s) | Atari Games | | Designer(s) | Mark Cerny | | Platform(s) | Arcade game, Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear, DOS, Mobile Phone, NES, Sega Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Tandy 1000, ZX Spectrum | | Release date | 1984 | | Genre(s) | Platform/Racing | | Mode(s) | Up to 2 players simultaneously | | Input methods | Trackball | | Cabinet | Custom upright | | Arcade system | Atari System 1 | | CPU | Motorola 68010 | | Sound | Yamaha YM2151, POKEY | | Display | 19" Horizontal orientation, Raster, standard resolution (Used: 336 x 240) |
Marble Madness is an arcade game by Atari Games released in 1984 by Czech programmer Mark Cerny. Using trackballs, players race marbles through an isometric 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, 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. The cryptic and somewhat eerie message "Everything you know is wrong" appears on the Silly stage due to the fact that the stage goes from lowest point to highest point, which is the exact opposite of all the other levels; and some physics are changed, such as upward ramps making the ball go faster; and tiny enemies players can squash. 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 difficult 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. (Konami's Gyruss, released a year earlier, had simulated "stereo" sound using discrete audio circuits).
PortsThe game was ported to various home computers and video game consoles. A few ports for personal computers were made by Electronic Arts, with the most accurate arcade translation seemingly being the Amiga version. The Commodore 64, Apple II, Apple IIGS, and PC versions had a secret level called the Water Maze which players could get to by being on the leftmost bottom platform of the first level at a certain time (13 seconds). Once reaching the Water Maze, the player was transported out of the level as soon as a mistake was made. The walkthrough can be found here (pick the latest date) and it requires two players to complete. The ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC ports came in a DeLuxe Edition with a Marble Madness Construction Set to create new levels. These versions were published by Melbourne House who had already released an unofficial clone called Gyroscope. In 2005, a Game Boy Advance port was included on DSI Games "Marble Madness/Klax", however the Marble Madness port was given poor reviews due to only having the first three levels. 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 Wii will support Marble Madness with its motion sensor (similar games such as Kororinpa: Marble Mania and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz have already been released). Rolling Madness 3D is an OpenGL remake.
ProblemsOwners of Marble Madness machines found that maintenance of the game became costly and difficult. The game required vigorous spinning of the track ball in order for the marble to reach high speeds. This caused the track balls (especially the left "Player 1" ball) to wear out quickly. Replacement of the track balls was expensive and time-consuming. Failure to replace partially-worn balls would lead to a frustrating (and often impossible) experience for its players. In order to compensate for the easily-worn "Player 1" track ball, game developers allowed either track ball to control the marble during 1-player games. However, this was not apparent to most players, so this workaround had limited usefulness. The lack of durability of the controllers is the primary reason why Marble Madness became difficult to find in arcades years after its release. By the mid-1990s, very few working Marble Madness games could be found anywhere. Today, even fewer exist. Some copies of the Game Boy version have been reported that after the second or third level, the game resets to the first level indefinitely.
SequelIn 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.
Marble Madness in popular culture- In the movie Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, the game (among others) is mentioned in a song that plays while Jack Black is moving through lasers.
- In Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers song "Jammin' Me", footage from the game is used, despite that the song is never mentioned anywhere in the lyrics.
See also| Title | Released | Platform(s) |
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| Gyroscope | 1985 | Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | | Spindizzy | 1986 | Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | | Airball | 1987 | Dragon 32/64, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS, PC DOS, Atari 8-bit, Game Boy Advance | | Snake Rattle 'n' Roll | 1990 | NES, Sega Mega Drive (ported) | | Super Monkey Ball | 2001 | Arcade, Nintendo GameCube, Mobile Phone, N-Gage | | Marble Blast Gold | 2003 | Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360 (XBLA) | | Ballance | 2004 | Windows | | Hamsterball Gold | 2004 | Windows | | Archer Maclean's Mercury | 2005 | PlayStation Portable | | Marble Blast Ultra | 2006 | Xbox 360 | | Overball | 2006 | Windows | | Kororinpa | 2007 | Wii | | Switchball | 2007 | Windows, Xbox 360 (XBLA) |
External links- Marble Madness Homepage Unofficial Marble Madness homepage.
- Marble Madness at MobyGames
- Information about Marble Madness from the MAME emulator pages
- Marble Madness at the Killer List of Videogames
- Marble Madness at World of Spectrum
- Marble Madness on the Amiga at the Hall of Light (HOL)
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