Many of the traps in Marble Madness required a preternaturally steady hand.

The Cerny Connection

Mark Cerny was one half of the two-man team that designed and programmed Marble Madness. Remarkably, he did so before he turned 20 years old. Though he hasn't enjoyed the same sort of high-profile celebrity that designers Sid Meier and Warren Spector have (with Marble Madness remaining the game that he's best known for), Mark Cerny has still been a force in the gaming industry. Since Marble Madness, he's been around the block and has worked for Atari, Sega, Crystal Dynamics, and Universal Interactive. His various credits include such games as Major Havoc, Millipede, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, and Jak and Daxter. (Cerny did not, however, have anything to do with Marble Man, the unreleased--and purportedly terrible--sequel to Marble Madness.)

Images courtesy of klov.com

Though there weren't many, each level in Marble Madness had a unique personality.

Video games may have gotten themselves into the pattern of recycling the "safe things" that worked the previous year, but in the beginning, you had to take risks and create something unique if you wanted some attention because there was no "last year's model" to fall back on. One of the results of this forced outside-the-box thinking was Atari's Marble Madness. Released in 1984, the game was the first to run on Atari's System 1 hardware, which also ended up powering games like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and RoadBlasters.

Like most great games, the premise behind Marble Madness was simple. You had to roll a marble from one end of a labyrinth to the other before time ran out. There were six different levels in the game, and each offered a unique set of challenges. All of the levels, of course, required a steady hand and plenty of skill. Though there were plenty of obstacles in the way, your most significant opponent was the clock. The game could be played by two players, though even here it wasn't necessarily directly competitive, as additional time was awarded to the first player to get to the end of the maze--and there was no penalty for coming in second. There have been some pretty good ports of Marble Madness for almost a dozen different home platforms, but none have brought with them the arcade game's best feature--the trackball controller--which remains one of the best directly analogous control schemes for any video game.

Big trackballs aside, what really made Marble Madness stand out was its technically and aesthetically impressive visuals. Using a ray-traced labyrinth, the game was able to present a world with a vivid sense of 3D, which was something that no other game had really been able to pull off with as much success. An abstract design aesthetic was key to the overall look and feel of Marble Madness, with a lot of inspiration having been drawn from MC Escher's surreal lithographs that played with the perception of three-dimensional space.

Save for its strikingly realistic physics, there wasn't much that Marble Madness had in common with reality as we know it. The tiled landscape that your auto-locomotive marble would roll across was full of bizarre traps, like a gauntlet of evil vacuums and a bizarre wave machine. There were even more bizarre enemies, like gangs of lethal green acid pools and green slinky tube-things straight out of Yellow Submarine, which would hop up into the air and swallow your marble whole. It was deeply weird, but it was consistent in its weirdness, so nothing you saw seemed too strange within the context of the Marble Madness reality. The game also featured some wonderful synthesized music--in stereo even--and each of the game's six levels had its own unique tune. The dreamy, synthetic score fit the game's otherworldly appearance to a tee.

The design ideas presented in Marble Madness can still be seen from time to time in modern video games, though most notably in Sega's intensely difficult Super Monkey Ball games. The original Marble Madness itself still stands up to repeated play, despite the fact that the game is a mere six levels long.

What can I say about Marble Madness? Marble Madness is amazing. Artistically, the game still remains fresh--simply because of the purity of its design ethic. It had a sterile, gridlike look to it (almost as though it were conceived through the use of some kind of arcane mathematical equation), but there was still an undeniable artfulness to its execution. Even if you ignore its distinct visual style, Marble Madness still offers razor-sharp gameplay that can be relied on. After almost 20 years, I can still come back to the game's meager six levels and be just as entertained as when I first played them. This is definitely a testament to how great Marble Madness really is.