Marble Madness II: The Canceled Sequel To Classic Arcade Game Recovered For MAME Emulator

An anonymous reader writes: Atari pulled the plug on the release of Marble Madness II almost exactly 31 years ago after the follow up to their hit game failed to perform well in location tests. For decades the only way to play this now sought after rarity has been on one of a handful of known surviving units when it was exhibited by a private collector at annual events.

That has all changed after the ROM mysteriously appeared on The Internet Archive and was subsequently emulated by MAME developer David Haywood. Ars Technica provides background information on this story and talks with a number of the digital archaeologists involved. They discuss the events that unfolded, speculate as to why the game may have failed, and look at what it means to the community.

What it means

[drinkypoo]

What it means is that I need to find me another original style Kensington Turbomouse. A good friend of mine hacked one into an Amiga mouse for me back in the day. The later ones have more buttons and such, but none of them have the same solid feel.

Re:

[Dwedit]

The version of Marble Madness II that was leaked used a standard 8-way joystick, not a trackball. There was a prior version which used a trackball that also failed location testing.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Atari trackball then. I used to have one of those, too. When I think about all the shit I let go of before it was valuable because I had no stable relatives to store shit with... ugh

Re: What it means

[e3m4n]

Why would you need relatives to store your potential junk? Your place doesnt look like one of those hoarding shows does it?

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I needed to store my junk until it was valuable.

My place doesn't look like a hoarding show, I have shelves

Re: What it means

[e3m4n]

Theres always U-store. I know it costs money but you know the motto: Ass, Gas, or Grass; Nobody rides for free. Theres always a cost. At least u-store as clearly defined expectations lol

Re:

[skam240]

I cant speak for drinkypoo but when one is young and broke things like a U-store are not always options. I know I lost some stuff I'd rather have now during said period of my own life.

Maybe you never had a "young and broke" period in your own life though.

Re:

[e3m4n]

In my case it was young, broke, and in a war zone with limited storage. Though in that case many shipmates that were single definitely took advantage of storage units. Its definitely not the same scenario as living in a studio apartment. Even in 1990 the cost of rent in the SF Bay area was ridiculous compared to just about every other place I was ever stationed. The single people just stayed on the ship and got storage units for the excess stuff.

Re:

[habig]

huh - the entire point of Marble Madness was the trackball control coupled to the inertial physics. Loved that game: the perfect use for a trackball!

Never played the arcade original

[Powercntrl]

I do recall playing the NES port of the original, and the controls were frustrating, to put it mildly. Because the game utilized inertia, you had to react to where you anticipated the marble would go, rather than getting immediate feedback.

It was a bit like trying to play a modern FPS game with a lot of input lag. If the sequel was similar, that's likely what doomed it.

Re:Never played the arcade original

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a hit with both the critics and sales in the mid 80's so probably a good indication you just weren't a very knowledgeable kid.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That probably reflects poorly on you. It was the number 1 arcade game at release and was ported to many systems. It was relatively short lived as a favourite though as it was a relatively straightforward game with only a handful of puzzles which once you finished and became good at didn't have much replayability.

Re:

[Joce640k]

The Commodore Amiga port was a big selling port for the Amiga.

Re:

[nanoflower]

That was where I first became aware of the game. It was a great version that was faithful to the original arcade version (which also played quite a few times.)

Re:

[NormalVisual]

was faithful to the original arcade version

Except the marble was red in the Amiga port instead of the original blue. I played the hell out of that game.

Re:

[Darinbob]

Same here. I think arcades were on decline when Marble Madness was first out, but it was the sort of game that did well in an arcade; it has a unique and novel play style, only one control, and fun to watch others play over their shoulder (and thus likely to drop in a quarter yourself to prove you could do better).

Re:Never played the arcade original

[UnknownSoldier]

Then you didn't get out much.

It had a killer sound track [youtube.com] for the time.

Marble Madness was one of the first arcade games to be written in C. Designer Mark Cerny [mobygames.com] would eventually go to lead the development of the PS4 with Sony.

Re:

[Powercntrl]

Then you didn't get out much.

To be fair, kids are reliant on their parents for travel. I honestly don't remember there being any nearby arcades in the area of suburbia where I grew up, and if it wasn't for the NES port I'd have never heard of Marble Madness, either.

Re: Never played the arcade original

[e3m4n]

It wasnt as popular where I grew up. I remember there being distinct phases of types of gameplay. The twitch games like centipede, ms pac-man, galaga / galaxian, donkey kong, q-bert, tempest, etc; first dominated popularity. Then the games started gravitating to the vertical scrollers and horizontal scrollers. Golden Axe, Altered Beasts, all the driving games. The quarter pushers arrived around this era. Enter coins to continue where you left off like Gauntlet, TMNT, etc. once the fighting games came onto

Re:

[JackieBrown]

I used to walk to the laundry mat to play pacman and galaga. That was the closest thing I had to an arcade growing up :)

Re:

[Joce640k]

Marble Madness was one of the first arcade games to be written in C.

I think the Commodore Amiga version was C, too.

Re:

[dowhileor]

Did Marble Madness II have C++ libraries? I heard a long while back it did.

Re:

[Viol8]

"Then you didn't get out much."

Or maybe you live somewhere where there were arcades. Even in the early 90s here in the UK arcades were starting to close and video games in pubs and cafes were being replaced with fruit machines, with only the big city centre and seaside arcades remaining. Now only the latter remain and even they're fairly sparse with most space taken up with gambling machines and the video games crammed into a corner.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It had that distinctive Atari sound. They seem to have re-used designs a lot, so all their games sound kinda the same. Same instruments in the music, same sound effects.

Re:

[WeatherServo9]

All arcade manufacturers reused designs a lot; designing every game 100% from the ground up wasn't practical when you had a perfectly working system board that would work quite well for multiple games. Even when a new system was designed, some components would still be reused. In the case of Marble Madness a Yamaha YM2151 FM synthesizer chip (along with Atari's venerable POKEY chip) created the sounds so you'll get that nice, distinctive, rich, crunchy FM sound found not just from multiple Atari games but f

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, I mean that Atari seemed to re-use sound effects and instruments more than most.

It's interesting that you describe the sound as "crunchy". The YM2151 was actually pretty smooth, especially by the standards of the day. I don't know how many bits its DAC had, but compared say the Famicom's Ricoh 2A03 it was pretty nice. When you listen to NES sound you can really hear the aliasing as high frequency noise, something many emulators fail to get right.

Re:

[WeatherServo9]

Crunchy is probably the wrong word but I didn't have a better one off the top of my head. I didn't intend to refer to artifacts such as those from aliasing but rather the thick, textured sound the YM2151 is capable of especially when compared to PSG style chips of the era. For the NES, it seems almost nothing but an actual NES gets it 100% right; not just emulators, but many clones of the system sound a bit off too.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

I saw Marble Madness in a lot of arcades. It wasn't one of the ones where the arcade operator had to have multiples to handle the crowds, but it was at least a popular sideshow. If you could play the thing for more than a few minutes without failing, you could draw a small audience. I was terrible at it.

Re:

[Baconsmoke]

There's no way you were a kid in the 80s with ANY geek cred whatsoever if you haven't heard of Marble Madness.

Re:

[Gibgezr]

You are complaining about the part that made the game challenging and fun: without that sense of inertia, the game would have been trivially easy. And it lent the ball a sense of weight: you felt like you were combatting the mass of the ball, fighting against inertia.

Re:

[Joce640k]

If the sequel was similar, that's likely what doomed it.

The inertia was the entire point of the game. You had to learn to be delicate with the inputs.

If it was direct control then it would have been pointless.

(nb. I didn't like it)

Re:

[Kisai]

The NES port was rather inferior, in fact all home computer and console versions were inferior save for the Amiga, and if you're being generous, the Sega Genesis version (if only because it matches the arcade hardware enough, save for the terrible controls.)

What's interesting about Marble Madness II, is that it's basically a "what could have been", and what/when focus testing can pretty much ruin a product.

Never focus test a game. TV shows and Films you can have a focus test for because you're really only f

Re:

[jythie]

Years ago I worked for a coin-op/arcadeish company, and we made heavy use of a kind of focus testing. Though in our version, we basically set up the machines in a location and ran a camera behind them so we could record how people interacted with the games... see what they could not figure out, see what frustrated them, see what dumb stuff they did that might break it, etc. Very useful stuff. I think there were also conversations with customers afterwards to get their reactions, but as a dev I only ever

Re:

[JackieBrown]

You were pioneering telemetry :)

Re:

[Megane]

I recall that the Sega Genesis version was sort of okay with the "Sports Pad" trackball from their earlier Master System console.

Re:

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I do recall playing the NES port of the original, and the controls were frustrating, to put it mildly. Because the game utilized inertia, you had to react to where you anticipated the marble would go, rather than getting immediate feedback.

It was a bit like trying to play a modern FPS game with a lot of input lag. If the sequel was similar, that's likely what doomed it.

You wouldn't like Moonlander, either, with inertia and no magical way to grab the air. Or airless space as the case may be.

Modern kids are s

Re:

[skam240]

Modern kids are so spoiled. Jump and shift directions in air. Even jump a second time on the air to jump higher still

Both of those were features in Nintendo games that came out before Marble Madness.

MM 1

[Mister Transistor]

I loved the Atarisoft original PC version, very true to the arcade version. Or as close as you could get to it with a 16 color palette, and no sound hardware!

Only 1 person in the entire country was able to crack the PC self-booter!

Re:

[UnknownSoldier]

There have been tons of writeups such as Tome of Copy Protection [callapple.org] and videos such as E7 E7 E7 EE: The Story of the Greatest Copy Protection Ever Invented [youtube.com] for cracking Apple 2 games but is/was there a resource for cracking PC x86 games from the 80's? (On the Apple 2 you have almost complete control of the bitstream.)

Why introduce such a late sequel?

[DrMrLordX]

Galaga '88 was already baffling enough. Marble Madness 2/Marble Man in 1991 made no sense whatsoever. The original Marble Madness was a quintessentially '80s video game: abstract, bright colors, banging 8-bit chip tune soundtrack, and . . . did I mention abstract? That second level music was basically the Marble Madness theme for a lot of people since very few actually got past that level (and I think it played in the demo for the game).

Anyway, Marble Madness 2 should never have reached arcades any later

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

And for the record, I loved Galaga '88, but there was only one machine in any of the local arcades at a bowling alley, and I never saw anyone else playing it. Games like that just didn't have a place in American arcades, even by that point.

Can't be downloaded from anywhere

[Malays2 bowman]

So enjoy it on Internet Archive now before it gets pulled.

Re: Can't be downloaded from anywhere

[Malays2 bowman]

Also I keep hearing that this was "leaked all over the internet" but where the fuck is "all over the internet"?

  And what's on Github is juat script files to run the game in Mame, but not the actual game itself.

Re: Can't be downloaded from anywhere

[Malays2 bowman]

It's possible to download it from Internet Archive if you create an account with them. Something I had to find out about in a rather obscure Reddit thread reply.

Re:

[Briareos]

Uh... am I missing something? I definitely don't have an account there, but there's a box "download options" right under "2,632 Views / 29 Favorites"... which includes the ZIP containing the dumped roms.

Re: Can't be downloaded from anywhere

[Malays2 bowman]

Didn't appear on mine, but when I created an account it was there.

I wasn't using a VPN or "incognito" either.