Marble Madness

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. more...

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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" (The cryptic and somewhat eerie message "Everything you know is wrong" appears on this 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 "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 Wii will support Marble Madness with its motion sensor. Rolling Madness 3D is an OpenGL remake.

A few ports for personal computers were made by Electronic Arts, the best of which seemed to be the Amiga version. The Commodore 64, Apple IIe and PC 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). 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.

In 2005, a Gameboy 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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org