Marble Madness | Code Like It's 198x

Marble Madness began as a game of miniature golf. “I loved the idea of a playfield’s contours influencing the ball’s path,” Mark Cerny told Retro Gamer. Hitting a ball “didn’t get anyone too excited”, so the ball rolled instead, and the player steered it with a second ball: the arcade cabinet’s trackball. The result was a race down six short, steep courses drawn in isometric projection, full of drops, black marbles, acid and vacuum cleaners, against a clock that never gave enough time. A good player could finish the whole game in about four minutes, and that turned out to be its commercial problem.

Fast facts

Developer and manufacturer: Atari Games, 1984.
Credits: Mark Cerny (design and graphics programming), Bob Flanagan (game programming), Sam Comstock (animation), Brad Fuller and Hal Canon (sound).
Controls: a trackball for each player; one or two players at once.
Races: Practice, Beginner, Intermediate, Aerial, Silly and Ultimate.
Sound: music for a Yamaha FM synthesis chip, the YM2151, in stereo.
Home versions: Amiga (Electronic Arts, 1986), C64, Apple II and IIGS, Atari ST, NES (Milton Bradley), Mega Drive (Electronic Arts, 1991), Master System, Game Gear and Game Boy.

Making it

Cerny had joined Atari at 17. He told Retro Gamer that the often repeated story of his winning a design contest is untrue: a reporter writing a book of arcade tips introduced him to Atari’s vice-president of product design. He was handed a brief that summed up the arcade business of the time. A new game needed a new concept, new controls, and a simultaneous two-player mode, because falling arcade takings meant each cabinet had to earn from two players at once.

His first idea for new controls was a motorised trackball that would spin faster as the marble ran downhill and resist when it braked. It foundered on what Atari’s engineers called the “milk stool” problem. A trackball sits on three supports, “two rotate and a third is a passive support”, and three points are always stable; motors needed a fourth support, and “one leg often makes poor contact”. The plain trackball stayed. The racing idea stayed too, in reduced form. The hardware could not run physics for an opponent, so the game became a race against time, and the two-player mode was solved simply: the trailing marble is “‘killed’ and transported forwards, with a time penalty, to join the leading player”.

Cerny and Bob Flanagan wrote the game in C, which Cerny said was a first for Atari Games, whose programmers had used assembly language before. The cost was speed: Marble Madness updated at 30 frames a second instead of the usual 60. Cerny had hoped for a powerful custom chip with sprites the processor could redraw, so that the steel marbles could reflect their surroundings. Instead the game went out on a conventional board with ordinary sprites stored in ROM, which he remembered as the “rather unfortunately named ‘Budget System’”. Wireframe later described Marble Madness as the first game on Atari’s System 1, a board designed to be upgraded with new games.

The look came partly from necessity. “The game’s graphic design also reflects my limited art skills,” Cerny said; “it was something that could be calculated rather than drawn.” He wrote a small ray-tracer that generated each playfield from a height map. Because the images were made in advance, he could afford to smooth their edges and add shadows. The influence of M. C. Escher, four of whose prints hung in the house where Cerny grew up, shows in its impossible slopes. Sam Comstock animated the enemies to one rule: “no faces”. Atari had wanted smiling faces on the marbles, Wireframe noted; they survived only in the logo.

The six races

Each race is a single isometric course that scrolls as the marble falls towards the goal. The Practice race is a short introduction. The Beginner race brings the first enemies: the black “Steelie”, a marble that exists to knock the player off the edge, and green, slug-like marble munchers, which swallow marbles and cost the player time. Intermediate adds acid pools that roam the landscape and a moving “wave” in the floor, which Cerny animated himself. Aerial has vacuum cleaners that suck marbles in, a catapult, and hammers that come down at random. “Perhaps there’s a bit too much random death,” Cerny admitted. The Silly race breaks the rules, with polka dots, reversed gravity and a playpen where the player gets extra seconds for squashing miniature enemies. Ultimate “had to be nearly impossible”, with surfaces that slow the marble, ridges that block it and a glowing strip that speeds it up.

Sound

Cerny had nothing to do with the sound, but told Retro Gamer he was proud of it. The game used an FM synthesis chip made by Yamaha, which he said was a first for Atari Games “and perhaps even the coin-op industry as a whole”; Brad Fuller and Hal Canon “spent months investigating the ins and outs of the chip”, and the Beginner race’s tune was the first they finished. The chip was the YM2151, which went on to be used in many arcade boards of the later 1980s, and Wireframe described the result as “distinctive stereo music”. The claim for a first is best read as Cerny’s: public sources agree that Marble Madness was an early arcade use of the YM2151, not that it was the first game with FM sound.

In the arcade

Atari’s tests suggested a hit, and players agreed. “In our post-publication tracking, we watched Marble Madness be the number-one-earning game in all 18 arcades we sampled, and simultaneously drop out of the top spot in week seven,” Cerny said. Arcade games then succeeded if a typical game lasted about two and a half minutes. Marble Madness could be finished in four, and once players had learned it, they finished it and moved on. Most cabinets were converted to other games. In Britain Computer Gamer nominated it for Best Coin-op Machine of 1985, alongside Paperboy, Hang On and Commando.

Cerny wished afterwards that it had been longer, but more races would have needed more time and bigger ROMs, and “Atari Games was in severe financial trouble, and if Marble Madness hadn’t shipped on schedule, the factory would have been completely idle.” A sequel, Marble Man, led by Bob Flanagan, was cancelled. Cerny said it swapped the acid pools for enemies such as a knife and fork and a giant tomato, and used joysticks to save money: “this type of game doesn’t work well without a trackball.”

At home

Electronic Arts showed its Amiga version when the machine was launched in New York in 1985, and Info thought it would “look and play much better on the AMIGA than on Atari’s own ST”. It went on sale in 1986, programmed by Larry Reed. The Guide to Computer Living made it its Amiga Game of the Year for 1986, praising Reed’s “painstakingly faithful translation from arcade to Amiga” and calling it “the first program to define the Amiga’s potential as a game machine”. Edge, looking back in 1995, called it one of the first games “converted especially for the Amiga” and still looked detailed, but blamed “the bumbling tunes — which sounded like an Amiga emulating a Commodore 64” for letting the package down. MegaTech later wrote that Will Harvey’s first project for Electronic Arts had been converting Marble Madness to “various computer formats”.

In Britain the C64 version came from Ariolasoft, which sold Electronic Arts’ games there, at £9.95 on cassette and £14.95 on disk, for joystick only. It hid a secret water level for two players that, Retro Gamer reported, even Cerny had not known about. Apple II owners could buy it for the IIe and the IIGS, and a young reviewer in Apple2000 found the IIGS version “brilliant” and the IIe version much harder to control. Ariolasoft also sold the Marble Madness Construction Set for the Amstrad CPC, a different game with a level editor; Amstrad Action pointed out that Melbourne House’s Gyroscope had got to the idea first.

The consoles got the game later. Milton Bradley published the NES version, programmed by Rare, with both players at once as in the arcade, and when it reached Britain in 1991 Mean Machines called it “the best version of the game I’ve ever played, knocking spots off the Amiga version”. Electronic Arts’ Mega Drive cartridge, by Michael Schwartz with music by Steve Hayes, arrived in 1991; Mean Machines called it “a perfect arcade conversion” with tunes “stunningly close to the coin-op’s”. The Japanese Mega Drive release, by Tengen in 1993, carried the arcade game’s full credits. Virgin published versions for the Master System and Game Gear in 1992, and there was a Game Boy version as well.

Mark Cerny afterwards

Cerny left Atari Games for Sega, where he worked on Master System games in Tokyo, then set up the Sega Technical Institute in California, where American and Japanese staff made Sonic the Hedgehog 2. He later worked with Sony, and by 2013 Edge was describing him as the PlayStation 4’s lead architect, a role he also held for the PlayStation 5.

Sources

Retro Gamer, issue 53, 2008, pp. 82–87: “The Making of Marble Madness”, interview with Mark Cerny (the brief, the motorised trackball, C and 30Hz, the “Budget System”, the ray-tracer, Sam Comstock, the Yamaha chip and Fuller and Canon, the earnings, Marble Man, the six races, the C64’s water level).
Wireframe, issue 34, March 2020, p. 40: Mark Vanstone, “Code a homage to Marble Madness” (1984; the first use of a Yamaha FM chip, stereo music; the first game on System 1; the smiley faces).
Computer Gamer, issue 9, December 1985, p. 32: Game of the Year 1985 nominations.
Info, issue 8, September 1985, p. 23: the Amiga version shown at the Amiga launch.
Computer Gaming World, issue 31, September 1986, p. 11: the Amiga version newly released.
The Guide to Computer Living, vol. 3 no. 8, December 1986, p. 24: Amiga Game of the Year, programmer Larry Reed.
Zzap!64, issue 20, December 1986, p. 170: C64 review (Ariolasoft, £9.95 and £14.95; the loss of time to marble munchers).
Sinclair User, issue 55, October 1986, pp. 65–67: arcade conversions feature (Ariolasoft’s licence, no Spectrum version planned, Gyroscope).
Amstrad Action, issue 18, March 1987, p. 45: Marble Madness Construction Set review.
Apple2000, June 1989, p. 29: Apple IIe and IIGS review, £24.95.
Atari ST User, December 1989, p. 64: Atari ST version in a mail-order price list.
Mean Machines, issue 13, October 1991, pp. 70–71: NES review (MB Games, Rare, two players).
MegaTech, issue 1, December 1991, p. 29: Will Harvey’s conversions of Marble Madness.
Mean Machines, issue 16, January 1992, p. 84: Mega Drive review (Electronic Arts, £34.99).
Game Informer, issue 3, January 1992, p. 37: Marble Madness for the Game Boy.
Edge, issue 18, March 1995, p. 69: Amiga retrospective.
Retro Gamer, issue 36, 2007, p. 27: Cerny and the Sega Technical Institute.
Edge, issue 256, August 2013, p. 20: Cerny as the PlayStation 4’s lead architect.
“Marble Madness”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): the arcade credits as shown in the Japanese Mega Drive version, the Mega Drive credits, and the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear release dates. https://segaretro.org/Marble_Madness
“YM2151”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): the chip’s use in arcade boards from Marble Madness on. https://segaretro.org/YM2151 ; “Mark Cerny”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): his Master System work and his role as lead architect of the PlayStation 5. https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny