Retrospective: Marble Madness

By John Walker Published 27 March, 2011

The six levels of Hell.

I'm really struggling to play Marble Madness. And not because it's incredibly difficult. It's just too much. Too much sensory overload, too many childhood memories evoked by a single sprite or sound effect.

It's a game I haven't touched since my hilariously inept 12 year-old attempts. That was 21 years ago. I'm surely better at it now.

I'm no better at it now.

Atari's Marble Madness was originally developed for the arcades and became a big hit. Floppy-haired kids were challenged to guide a marble through Escher-ish mazes using a trackball, and encouraged to seek independent glory.

Such was the game's success it received a port to every gaming device imaginable. It reached me via my father's Atari ST, about three years after the original release.

I love my dad very much, but his crime of getting an ST instead of an Amiga has been hard to forgive. And I'm not dragging up the tedious argument over which machine was better (I believe the correct answer is n, where n = the machine you owned). I'm lamenting the accompanying magazines.

'Retrospective: Marble Madness' Screenshot 1

It's not as smooth as the Amiga version, or as shiny as the arcade, which only makes it more sinister.

There was, for a time, incredible multiformat mag Zero. But when it came to specialist publications, to say the ST fell short is like describing the Grand Canyon as quite a big hole. The Amiga had the greatest gaming magazine of all time, Amiga Power – the guidebook followed by anyone worth reading today. The Atari had, er, ST Format.

I'm sorry to any Format writers out there, but to a 12 year-old in 1989, that was about as cruel a thing as that year's cancellation of Doctor Who. I remember scouring the pages of features about making boring music or drawing a sphere in DPaint, trying to find something silly, something naughty. I can recall one slightly cheeky feature about how to clean your mouse's ball.

But I still loved my ST. To compensate for the above loss I did at least have the bee mouse cursor, which no stupid Amiga owner could compete with. When something was loading we Atari owners didn't see a boring egg timer – we saw a busy buzzy bee. A bee that I would buzz around the screen, while singing the "Buzzy Bee" song. ("Ooh, buzzy buzzy bee, buzzy buzzy bee, buzz bu- oh it's loaded.")

'Retrospective: Marble Madness' Screenshot 2

I think this is the most fearsome depiction of Hell I've ever seen.

Which doesn't in the slightest bring me back to Marble Madness. As evocative as that bright green desktop and its accompanying insects are the isometric, minimalist mazes that I could no more roll a marble through then than now.

The game was famous for its difficulty – praised for it, in fact. Arcade gamers liked to be challenged, to empty every ten pence from their wallet into the machine so as to suffer as much as possible, and afford no bus. And those sadists ensured that the home computer ports were just as tricky.

In a world before physics, games were allowed to invent their own laws. Marble Madness's marble is sort of affected by the more natural laws, accelerating as it goes down slopes, coming to a stop after it's rolled so far on a flat surface.

But it also added a few new rules to Newton's list, like its weird propensity to stick to two-dimensionally thin edges, or seeming desperation to refuse to turn around and throw itself off a ledge.

But as if just moving the marble weren't tricky enough, Atari Games decided it was time to introduce an evil enemy marble as soon as the second level. Along with green sausage worm creatures that gobbled you up, raising and lowering floors, a second evil enemy marble bent on your destruction, and a cruel one-minute time limit to ensure a game over was only ever seconds away.

I'm astonished by the patience I displayed as a child. My willingness to replay the same few levels of a game in the hope of just once scraping through to the next is something I would be hard pressed to generate today.

I can remember so many hours spent with Impossible Mission 2, despite never figuring out what I was supposed to do with the tapes (I still don't know to this day) and so never progressing.

I spent an idiotic portion of my life playing the first three screens of Chuckie Egg 2, never to discover what happened next. And I was content to struggle with those opening levels of Marble Madness, in a way I just cannot fathom today.

'Retrospective: Marble Madness' Screenshot 3

It's not okay when the initial drop frightens me.

Perhaps it's the glitchiness, the way it so often feels unfair when you fail. Or the fact that not completing one of its enormously difficult levels means having to go back and repeat the slightly less enormously difficult ones again. Whatever it is, it certainly comes down to my being a terrible person.

So of course I never knew that it was only six mazes long. Six! And people thought Homefront was short. But for me then, and seemingly for me now, it may as well be infinite for all the chance I have of ever finding out what the sixth level even looks like.

However, one of the best motivating factors for returning to the game despite all its complexity is the absolutely stunning, almost frightening soundtrack. Composed by Brad Fuller and Hal Canon, the music combines with the deathly noise as you fall and the bl-el-el-el-el-eb sound of reappearing at the most recent checkpoint to bring back too many sense memories at once.

'Retrospective: Marble Madness' Screenshot 4

Actually, I think I just hate this game.

In fact, I can feel traces of techniques, best paths and mistakes to avoid reawakening inside me. Recollections of a time when I was okay with endless, repetitive failure.

In fact, so much of this game just seems sinister. Its minimal design, those long, deadly drops in the Ariel maze's Formica hell, the enemies like alien organic tubes and puddles, and most horrific of all, the broom that briskly sweeps you away on failure... It's like being shown a fever dream from my childhood.

Fortunately, Marble Madness doesn't seem to have scarred me for life. Little has changed. I've spent my day filling the three-letter spaces on the high score card with "BUM", "POO" and "WEE", and shouting "not fair!" as my marble rolls backward off the narrow path. Any minute now, I expect my mum will tell me to stop playing because it's time for Scouts.

Picture of John.

About John Walker

Read more articles from John by visiting the John Walker archive page.

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Comments (58) Latest comment 11 months ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Arwin #1 11 months ago

    I bought this for my Atari ST back in the day. I liked it a lot and got through all six levels within a day after my purchase. As the game just ended right there though I was shocked, and went back to the store to complain. The guy in the store was surprised and told me the Amiga version looped the levels with ever tighter time limits at least. I decided to trade for Gauntlett 2 instead, which was a wise decision, and also cheaper so I even got some cash back too. Later I even soldered a connection to my serial port for two additional joysticks for four players.

  • Vroomparrot #2 11 months ago

    "The Atari had, er, ST Format."

    There was ST Action. And I'm reasonably sure that later on there were 3 versions of The One, including 1 for the ST.

    Yes Marble Madness was hard, but then many games from the 8 and 16 bit era hard. Kids these days eh, they don't know easy they've got it.

  • BonzoBanana #3 11 months ago

    I had this on the Atari ST too. I think it was bundled in a huge mega pack of games. I bought a Atari 520ste powerpack I think it was called but you could buy the summer pack games for an additional £29.99 so I had like 40 games from day one. I don't think I bought another game except for Elite for about a year. Marble Madness seems like the inspiration for Monkey Ball. Also if memory serves me right there was something even earlier on the spectrum that was similar but that may have been inspired by the arcade game rather than being original itself. I remember now it was Melbourne House's Gyroscope. Looked identical to Marble Madness except for the Gyroscope instead of a ball. There was also Bobby Bearing which looks inspired by Marble Madness but doesn't play the same.

  • gerald #4 11 months ago

    The game in one image.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/11 @ 09:33

  • RodHull #5 11 months ago

    I still have a nice collection of Amiga Power magazines that I have a cheeky flick through when I'm supposed to be getting some mundane bit of tat out of the loft. The greatest magazine for the greatest of the 16 bit home computers, natch.

  • peterfll #6 11 months ago

    "Everthing you know is wrong" unfortunately in the arcade it was level 5 I could get to and no further.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/11 @ 09:43

  • Arwin #7 11 months ago

    As for magazines, I was just old enough to enjoy more than just games on my Atari ST, so I was alright with most magazines. ;) But I became a big fan of the multi-platform games magazine ACE, for as long as that lasted. If there were any magazine like that today, I'd subscribe to it again in a jiffy. I can only imagine the kind of debate that their 'A-list' would cause these days on the internet, or how publishers/advertisers would go mental ... :D But I almost universally agreed with that list. And the layout of their six-page reviews were a work of art in themselves. I was so disappointed when the guys making it stopped and went on doing other stuff, for no apparent other reason that they were bored and wanted to do something new. But as talented as those guys were, that seemed entirely reasonable to me at the time.

    @gerald: thanks - now you can see why this game can be very short once you get the hang of it. ;)
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/11 @ 09:43

  • arthurp8 #8 11 months ago

    An article on Marble Madness and not one mention of the creative genius behind it, Mr Mark Cerny?? If you are going to look back then at least credit the mastermind behind the game, mention his illustrious exploits since, and the various games over the years that have been inspired by Marble Madness. So many mentions in articles on this site of people not fit to make Mark's tea yet you couldn't find space to include him - oh well...
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/11 @ 09:46

  • TheNinkyNonk #9 11 months ago

    Atari ST rocked. It was the smart choice and far more versatile a machine. The Amiga was like an Audi: overpriced, overrated and what you bought if you liked feeling smug yet didn't have the smarts to explain why you'd bought it. Best machine war ever.

    LMAO, looks like the Amiga crew all grew up and bought Audis! Not found a sense of humour yet guys? Sheesh.
    Edited by 1 at 27/03/11 @ 17:42

  • StooMonster #10 11 months ago

    Meh to ST/Amiga versions and playing with a mouse ... The only way to play Marble Madness is with a trackball. I could get to level 6 on the arcade version, but don't think I ever finished it. MAME with a proper arcade controller, which includes a trackball, is the way to play today.

    Saying that, I had this game on Amiga and ST and seem to recall that I preferred the Amiga version, there should be a Digital Foundry Faceoff to see which was best!

  • Vortex808 #11 11 months ago

    I had both this and gyroscope on Amiga. They were both infuriatingly difficult. I love these retro features though, they make me feel young again *and* even older at the same time!

  • handsonhips101 #12 11 months ago

    Couldn't get past that level with the hammers. Still can't. Best version is the one on the sony ericsson phones circa 2006, like the original but 3d and controlled by the tilt mechanism. Tidy.

  • jamhead #13 11 months ago

    Loved this game.

    Can someone please convert to iOS?

  • OrgasmicMutton #14 11 months ago

    Bloody Scouts! I want to play computer games not fucking crab football! How hard is that to understand?

  • sonicyoda #15 11 months ago

    You have to control it with the mouse on ST!? Ouch. No wonder it's hard!
    I've got it on Mega Drive and can happily rinse the game on the most difficult setting all day long! I love the 5th stage with all it's backwards logic.

  • dwalker109 #16 11 months ago

    I had an ST, and probably saw as far as level two or three on this. I also have an Audi, though I guess I am foolish and should have bought a Skoda. Right on!!!

  • Stoatboy #17 11 months ago

    Love Marble Madness. It's pure video game - it could never have been anything else. It still looks awesome, it still sounds fantastic, and it still plays well all these years later. The machine was a thing of beauty too. Man, I miss proper arcades. :(

    Regardless, great game. I'd probably not put it in my top 10 games ever, but it was far more influential on me than many I would. I'd probably stick this in as one of my first choices in the argument that video games are art. (I'm not sure if I want them to be and I don't care if they are, tbh, but if I had to provide evidence then this would be one of my first exhibits.)

    An absolute belter.

    Oh, and Amiga Power was properly awesome.

  • Harmonica #18 11 months ago

    Genuinely one of the greatest games ever and a classic. Great art style too. I regularly bring the game up in mixed gaming company and pretty much nobody has heard of it. Bloody plebs :)

    edit: also happened to have a dad who opted for the ST and agree totally about the magazines. I ended up buying Power and Format each month, there was so much crossover and the writing in Power was obviously great, rarely if ever bettered.

    Much kudos to you Mr Walker for writing about this game. Now: try Mousetrap or Steg the Slug :)

    About the cursors/GUI, I fondly (not fondly) remember the bomb that represented things 'going wrong'. Hence the phrase 'it's bombed', which I still use today and nobody has a clue what I mean.
    Edited by 5 at 27/03/11 @ 12:20

  • DrStrangelove #19 11 months ago

    I had this on Master System. I was quite late, I already had a Super Nintendo, but on a massive sale I bought a "new" Master System 1 with 3D shutter glasses and six 3D games for about 30 quid. Needless to say, the glasses didn't work.

    But from the shops' bargain bins I bought some real gaming gems like Castle of Illusion and Golden Axe Warrior. Marble Madness was one of them, and certainly one of the most ingenious games around.

  • malloc #20 11 months ago

    Too right on the Impossible Mission game, never figured out what you were supposed to do in that game but for some bizarre reason I simply couldn't stop playing it.

  • vanjenko #21 11 months ago

    I had this game for the NES, epic memories. I thought no one else played this game, didnt know it was a cult hit.

    Crab football at the scouts! Ha, the second worst way to get a sore arse at scouts.

  • arty #22 11 months ago

    Another vote for the need to mention Mark Cerny.

  • X #23 11 months ago

    Is this quite possibly the shortest ever game?

  • Harmonica #24 11 months ago

    "Is this quite possibly the shortest ever game?"

    Considering most people played it for hours and hours and never completed it, it's not really that short :)

  • Kaminari #25 11 months ago

    Isometric 3D not only ruled the day, it also saved video games back in 1984.

    I can't even start to count how many copies this game bred. My favourite Marble Madness clones on the Speccy were probably Bobby Bearing and Revolution. Gyroscope was the "official" sequel to Marble, but somehow it failed to capture my interest.

  • utterdrivel #26 11 months ago

    @PS_2010 - that was Amiga Format. I remember chuckling to that back in the day. http://amr.abime.net/t rivia_17

  • Yuroko #27 11 months ago

    Don't slag off the ST. It could run Cubase!

  • mcmothercruncher #28 11 months ago

    Played the crap out of Marble Madness with my winky little rubber Speccy keys :)

  • INTVGene #29 11 months ago

    Loving the Retrospectives as always. Great game too. I don't think I ever saw the 4th maze.

  • GamesConnoisseur #30 11 months ago

    My Amiga 500 didnt really replace the arcade experience with trackball, that was the only way to play!

    Felt sorry for young generations since the demise of arcade, as many games still needed to be played in its true arcade setup, be it trackball, 360 cubicle etc, as no matter how powerful the home gaming machine is, doesnt replicate the experience fully.

  • Eraserhead #31 11 months ago

    ST Format got *much* better a couple of years later. About the time I started working on it, coincidentally.

  • Astro-Creature #32 11 months ago

    I had the NES version. It was hard as nails.

  • vizzini #33 11 months ago

    The spiritual predecessor to Super monkey ball was ported in various quality and features on computers of the time.

    On the Spectrum(& C64, Amstrad) I remember them kick starting the Play, Create, share ethos, with a full on level editor(but can't recall if you could save out to tape), and itdidn't seem to make it into the other versions I played in the next gen (ST, Amiga, PC).

    I played the arcade version in service stations, fairs and Bournemouth arcade when young, and about 10 years ago while in one of Largs(Scotland's) arcades I got to play both Marble Madness and Strider in all their glory.

    I wonder if the ST had launched and sold big at the height of the arcade success, whether Marble Madness would have been an ST exclusive, like Super Monkeyball 1 is a triforce/cube exclusive and 2 is a cube exclusive.

    Hamsterball is a great wipeout styled Monkeyball/Marble Madness clone, and I always mean to get round to buying Archer Maclean's Mercury or Mercury Meltdown on PSP to see how they play.

    Hats off to Marble Madness for kick starting so much greatness, but what I really want is for Sega to make an arcade perfect Super Monkeyball (main game @ 1080p) with perfect versions with ocean shaders and depth cueing fog of Monkey target 1 & 2 (from Gamecube) to make up for the abominations(imo) that are Super Monkey Deluxe on PS2 & Xbox

  • Shane86 #34 11 months ago

    I had this game when I was 7, don't think I finished the first level

  • pomegran #35 11 months ago

    @Gerald - now that my friend is a thing of fucking beauty

  • Mayhem64 #36 11 months ago

    Zzap!64 > Amiga Power

    As for Impossible Mission 2, you got eight audio tapes out of the safes, but two were duplicates. You had to edit the master tape so that it only had the unique six tracks left on it.

    Back to Marble Madness... brilliant, seemingly impossible, fair and pretty hard to play unless you are using the trackball. Mind you, I have managed to complete it in the past, but it was some effort.

  • bladdard #37 11 months ago

    I had this on the amiga and it was a port of the ST version so no enhanced sound or graphics.

    Great game though but so f****** frustrating!

    PS: I always felt cheated when I bough an amiga game when it had been directly ported from the ST.
    Edited by 2 at 27/03/11 @ 23:19

  • reflux #38 11 months ago

    I had a Wico Trackball ( http://ww w.richardlagendijk.nl/foto/cip/... ) which worked great with the ST/Amiga versions of the game. Can't remember using it for much else though and can't for my life recall if I still have it somewhere or managed to pass it on to some poor bloke.

  • Wilfster #39 11 months ago

    A friend of mine had Marble Madness on the Amiga which I borrowed although I'm not sure I got past more than a couple of the levels.

    Nice to see a mention of Zero magazine though - used to love that. MY favourite was always 'Norris McWhirter - the gentle voice of reason'. They used to be quite controversial and putting a demo of a strip poker game on their cover disk meant no shop would stock it and it went under in short order.

  • TaniumZX #40 11 months ago

    Spindizzy on the C64 - now that was a hardcore take no prisoners game

  • Canyarion #41 11 months ago

    I remember playing this game and I remember I was... compelled by it.

    A few years ago I tried playing it again. I quit within 10 minutes. :(

    I think just the concept of a game was interesting enough back in those days. Imagine being a 6 year old kid and controlling a virtual marble in a virtual, crazy world. That was awesome and it didn't matter that the game was almost impossible to control.

  • wiper #42 11 months ago

    As John started complaining about the choice of magazines for ST owners I was beginning to fume - how /dare/ he not know about Zero! It was amazing, the useless bas- Oh, he did read it. Carry on, Mr Walker, carry on!

    (that said, I actually loved scouring ST Format (and even the lesser ST Action... and another magazine, I'm sure, though I can't recall for the life of me what it might've been). But then, I was reading them between the ages of five and ten, so my critical faculties weren't too developed by then. I wonder how much being brought up on ST Format is to blame for my incredibly boring writing?)

  • Gammerz #43 11 months ago

    Completed this in an arcade in Leicester Square, London. The impressive guitar soundtrack at the end went on for ages and was so loud it drowned out all the other games. One of those decent rewards for finishing a game. Also remember the game had hammers, textured floors that made you bobble up & down, icy floors, and a reverse level where everything was shrunken, where you got to run over the black balls and worms and the gravity was inverted. You could do jumps too if you hit the ramps quickly enough but got stunned on landing. Great game with perfect controls: the tracker ball!

  • handsonhips101 #44 11 months ago

    You tube it. Watch the guy who completes it in three minutes. Crazy. Really mad video.

  • tossum #45 11 months ago

    This is the reason I still have a trackball stored under my bed :D

  • RobTheBuilder #46 11 months ago

    Out of interest. Did anyone ever find out what the 3456 numbers were on the first level. I always used to think there was a secret bit somewhere...

  • 3william56 #47 11 months ago

    God, that game was brilliant - the 90s Portal. The arcade version was a real workout, pummelling the trakball for all it's worth to pull an emergency stop or make a corner - put the vestiges of shoulder muscles on many a skinny nerd kid. And the music and sound effects just made it even more awesome. Never being into fighting games, it was probably the last game that made arcades an essential before the tidal wave of the PS1 put us all back in our bedrooms in front of the telly.

    Finally beating it (after an investment of god knows how many 10ps) was my greatest arcade moment.

    B*stard black ball, b*stard acid pools, b*stard pop up vaccums...

  • IneptPercy #48 11 months ago

    As it is I was an Amiga 600 owner, but my only memory of this game was sheer frustration on the C64 version and never loading it again.

  • Mayhem64 #49 11 months ago

    Yeah, sadly the C64 conversion was a pig to load on disk as well...

  • super_monty #50 11 months ago

    I loved my Amiga and Speccy, good point about patience, there is no I would sit an complete most of the retro games now. Imagine the torture of some thinking like Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy2

  • Ptarmigandalf #51 11 months ago

    Loved it as a kid. Remember the playground area, where you squish your enemies' children? Even then it was cathartic, yet a bit disturbing.

  • jonfon #52 11 months ago

    I spent an idiotic portion of my life playing the first three screens of Chuckie Egg 2, never to discover what happened next.

    Ah the spider room. Weirdly probably the most difficult screen in the entire game (unless you're saying you couldn't figure out that you had to bring the guard dog the bone from a screen 2 back, in which case I'm not sure if computer games are for you :) )

  • Dromedary #53 11 months ago

    I play this every now and then on Atari ST emulator. Nice stuff though I usually get stuck on second level.

    I pretty much learned my english by reading ST Format. There were quite many english gaming and general computer magazines available here in Finland including every magazine mentioned over here. Ace was ace too. Eurogamer should start giving ratings out of a thousand like Ace did. It'd be so much fun to if a multi-format game on PS3 would get a 895 and XBox version a 897.

  • steveb07 #54 11 months ago

    ST Action was a great mag the best bit was Jeff Minter's page

  • skuzzbag #55 11 months ago

    "Don't slag off the ST. It could run Cubase! "

    The only computer with a dedicated midi port. That was a genius move by Atari and meant that you could still see the Atari ST being used as a pro music sequencer in studios well into 2000. Pretty much all of the big name dance producers used the platform during the 90's.

    Unfortunately I had an Amiga which was great for games but not very good as a sequencer due to a shoddy midi external box and hence crap timing. Then I got a PC which also turned out to be crap at timing!

  • 32768Colours #56 11 months ago

    12 in 1989? Same here!

    I loved the old isometric games. My favourites were probably Spindizzy, Quazatron and the mighty Head over Heels! Different game styles, but the one thing all these games had in common was how insanely difficult they were, even though you'd carry on playing them for hours regardless!

    Ah they were the days!

  • fluff_the_tiger #57 11 months ago

    Hah , Ace? I remember them - didnt they have a score out of 1000 ? Ridiculous!

  • Architect_z #58 11 months ago

    I had this game on either mega drive or master system, can't quite remember which one.

    HD remake anyone?