A Maddening Experience

I don’t think anyone would normally accuse marbles of being aggravating. They’re tiny glass orbs that you flick and knock around. They roll, they bounce, they look pretty. There’s really not much more to them, so to sit there and cuss at them after failing, over and over, to roll them somewhere, that just seems like such a foreign concept. At least, it would be if you’ve never played Marble Madness, the game that likely frustrated an entire generation of gamers.

Marble Madness was developed by Atari Games and released into arcades in 1984. Its initial release saw enough success that the game quickly moved over to all of the various home consoles of the era, and it kept getting releases year after year for any system that would have it. Atair, Game Boy, Game Gear, ZX Spectrum, Nintendo, Genesis. If you had a console between 1984 and 1990 you likely had a copy of Marble Madness floating around in your collection. Hell, I have three and I don’t even know how any of them showed up on my shelves. I think they spawned via osmosis, just one day leaching out of the combined carts I had there until I was like, “oh, right, I’ve always had this game…”

Interestingly, the first time I played the game it wasn’t on any sensible console. While I did eventually get it for the NES, Game Boy, and Genesis, the version I first touched was a friend’s Tiger Electronic Handheld, and it was an awful experience, as all Tiger games were. It was clunky and hard to play, and the game lacked any of the style or polish that other versions had. But even then, I could tell there was something interesting, something special about the idea. Sure, it was just marbles rolling around, but it was also more than that.

The goal of Marble Madness is to get your marble from one end of a stupidly elaborate maze to the other. Two players can compete at a time, each set at the top of the stage with slightly different paths they’ll initially take before their balls converge along the route. Various traps, obstacles, and enemies will get in the way, and the player has to learn where these problems are and know how to avoid them. If not, the marble will fall, or break, or dissolve, and the player will suffer a time loss while the marble is put back together.

Stages are timed, so the time loss is the major factor to worry about. There aren’t any lives, technically, so players can break their marbles as many times as they have to in the name of speed. The issue is that once time runs out, it’s game over. No continues, no picking back up. Once you’re done, you’re done, and you have to start back over again. Thankfully the game is only five stages long, and can be sped through in five minutes if you’re really, really good. Just, how many people were that good back in the day?

That’s actually the beauty of the game. Arcade games were designed to give players about three minutes per quarter, letting them feel like they were getting their money’s worth. Too short and the quarter was wasted. Too long and the arcades didn’t make as much money as they needed. Games had to have the right balance to let players feel like they were making progress while still munching their quarters efficiently, and the design of Marble Madness hit that perfectly. It was only five minutes… could you get to the end.

Because the stages took about a minute a piece, players would end up feeling like they were making real progress. They could complete the easiest training stage no problem, but then the difficulty quickly ramped up from stage to stage, including the inverted wacky stage that really changed up everything about the game. Players could progress quickly, but most runs would run out of time (which added up cumulatively from stage to stage) right around the third level. You know, right about at the three minute mark. The game was devilishing engineered like that.

Naturally, playing the game in arcades was the best way to experience Marble Madness. While the home console ports were all generally good (the Tiger Electronics version notwithstanding), most of them didn’t have the tight control of the original arcade game. That’s because the arcade machine used a trackball for precise movement around the stages, while most home consoles had very imprecise D-pads instead. Sure, the ones with joysticks could be better especially if those joysticks were actually engineered well, but most players probably experienced the game on the NES or Genesis, and those controllers just weren’t as good for the title as other versions.

And yet, even then, the game was a hit. It might not have controlled as precisely on the NES or Genesis as it did in arcades, but that didn’t stop players from popping in the cart and trying over and over again anyway. Sure, when you can just retry over and over on a cart it lacks that same immediacy as when you had to pop a quarter in and desperately try to beat the game on a single credit. The experience was different, and I think that took away a little of the adrenaline of the game by comparison. I know I’d pop my cart in, play one or two rounds, and then move on to something else. The game was hard, and a little mean, aas it stuck to its arcade-style roots.

Still, even now I have fond memories of the game. It had something interesting to it, a mix of fast gameplay, spiking difficulty, awesome tunes (oh, the soundtrack was something legendary), and silly graphics that just really worked. Atari has something special on their hands, all thanks to designer Mark Cerny, and the game has lived on, still finding releases on random consoles, collections, and online marketplaces to this day. That magic mix of fun and frustration still keeps the players rolling their marbles on, trying to get to one more board, one more time across the finish line.

The real tragedy is that the sequel, Marble Man: Marble Madness II never saw an official release. It was a longer, more involved game that tried to push the whole concept further, but while the game was essentially done and out for testing on prototype machines, the game didn’t fare well enough to get an official release. Of course, that was 1991 when Street Fighter II was all the rage, so it’s understandable why players might not have been interested in this ball rolling game anymore. You can find the game online, though, if you’re curious.