Marble Madness
Marble Madness is a one- or two-player game. Two players can play at
the same time and compete to reach the goal first. The player controls
a red marble or a blue marble via the correspondingly colored Trak-Ball
controls.
The player's main goal is to race toward the goal in minimum time by maneuvering his red or blue marble along treacherous paths high atop the unique cubic raceway. The timer ticks away and ends the game if the player does not reach the goal in the allotted time. Numerous obstacles and unfriendly creatures on the raceway try to destroy the marble. The marble will always magically reappear, but, of course, several precious seconds on the timer are lost.
As the action begins, the player skillfully maneuvers the blue or red marble down the raceway, through numerous obstacles, toward the goal. As the player nears the bottom of the screen, the raceway automatically scrolls upward, revealing more of the raceway. Note that in a one-player game, only the blue ball is active on the screen, but either the blue or red Trak-Ball may be used to maneuver the blue marble.
Upon reaching the goal area, action briefly stops while the player's points are tallied. Bonus points are awarded for unused seconds on the timer and for finishing the race without losing a marble off the edge of a cliff. In the two player game, the players can race along cooperatively, each going for maximum points, or they can compete by bumping each other into hazards or off the cliffs.
The action resumes on Raceway Two where the player encounters the first adversaries; the Black Steelie and the Green Marble Munchers. The Black Steelie and the Marble Munchers' sole purpose is to try to block the way to the goal. Remember, the player must reach the goal before the timer runs out to advance to the next raceway! The player can complete six different raceways, each successive one requiring more skill.
Mark Cerny was only 17 years old when he joined Atari and designed Marble Madness. The game was designed as part of a contest Atari ran at the time, allowing outsiders to design a game. Mark was very well known for his game-playing skills and easily won the contest. He then taught himself how to program in assembly language before joining Atari, so he found it very easy to settle in at Atari.
Marble Madness was the first game to run on the new Atari System 1 hardware upon its 1984 release, and was the perfect showcase for Atari to demonstrate the technical superiority of its new arcade architecture, it was also the first game to feature such impressive and cleanly rendered pseudo-3-D Graphics. The original design brief called for the trackball to be motorized and synchronize its spin with that of the marble, to simulate inertia.
Marble Madness was the first game to feature true stereo sound; it was the first game to truly capitalise on what in-game music could offer the player, with each level having its own distinctive, and suspense building soundtrack. Marble Madness was also one of the few games of the time to have a definite goal, in that the game ends when all levels are completed. (arcade-history)
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