Marble Madness
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| Marble Madness | |
| Missing image Marblemadnessscreenshot.png Marble Madness screenshot | |
| Developer: | Atari Games |
| Publisher: | Atari Games |
| Game designer: | Mark Cerny |
| Release date: | 1984 |
| Genre: | Platform |
| Game modes: | Up to 2 players simultaneously |
| Cabinet: | Standard |
| Controls: | Trackball |
| Monitor | |
| Orientation: | Horizontal |
| Type: | Raster, standard resolution (Used: 336 x 240) |
| Size: | 19 inch |
| Notes | |
| The game can only make horizontal and vertical lines, so diagonal lines had to be rendered by hand. | |
Marble Madness is an arcade game by Atari Games released in 1984. Using trackballs, players race marbles through an 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.
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, and the trackball controls, which are purposely imprecise and difficult to master.
This was the first Atari System I game; it was also the first video game with true stereo sound.
Ports
The game was ported to various home computers and video game consoles, including the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, PC and Sega Master System. An emulated version of the arcade game is also 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 extremely rare these days.
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Sequel
In 1991, a sequel, Marble Madness 2: Marble Man, was in development. For unknown reasons, the game didn't make it out of playtesting. Arcade cabinets are known to exist [1] (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=M&game_id=8619), but none of the ROMs have been dumped for usage in emulators like MAME.
Edit: The Marble Madness ROMs have been dumped for a long time already and available for emulator usage.
External links
- Marble Madness (http://eager.back2roots.org/DATA/M/MARMD.HTML) Amiga version info page
- Information about Marble Madness (http://www.mame.dk/gameinfo/marble/) from the MAME emulator pages
- The KLOV entry for Marble Madness (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=M&game_id=8618)
- Trackballs (http://trackballs.sourceforge.net/), a marble madness clone running under Linux and Windows.
- Supergerball (http://www.supergerball.com/), a commercial game based on a similar idea
- Hamsterball (http://www.raptisoft.com/hamsterball.shtml), another commercial gamede:Marble Madness