If you are looking for a fun game to play you should consider playing Marble Madness.
Marble Madness was developed by Atari Games with Bob Flanagan as the software engineer and Mark Cerny as the designer. They were both responsible for programming the game which was a huge success for many years to come.
History
Now you may be wondering what is marble madness a brief history and how to play it. Marble Madness is an arcade video game that came out in 1984. Mark Cerny, got the inspiration for the arcade game from racing games, artwork, and miniature golf. His plan was to create a game that had a unique control system and to do so he went through several design ideas. From the moment the arcade game was released it was widely successful and was the inspiration for any other games. It was one of the highest-earning games in the arcade and around 4,000 cabinets were sold. In the game, you control the marble by using a trackball and you guide this marble through six courses that have obstacles and enemies within a time limit. Marble Madness gained praise for its incredible visual design, stereo soundtrack, and the game’s different levels of difficulty. Since 1986, the game was ported to different platforms and home versions were published to Nintendo Entertainment System by Rare and Electronic Arts. A sequel of the game was set to release in 1991 but location testing showed the game could not succeed in competition with other games, so for this reason, the sequel was never released.
What is Final Fantasy? A brief history and how to play it. Know all
The two players were comfortable with C programming language which is a computer programming language that prevents unintended operations. Atari games have always been programmed in assembly language but the C language was easier to program so that is why Cerny and Flanagan decided to use this. C programming is less efficient and it causes Marble Madness to operate at a slower speed than other arcade games. This did not lessen the success of Marble Madness in any way. Cerny used a motorized trackball system that would allow the ball to spin faster and brake when it traveled downhill or uphill. He also wanted to use powerful custom chips that would cause RAM-based sprites to be animated but the hardware was a less advanced system. Cerny was very advanced for the time period he was living in, and because of this, he had to simplify the overall design of the game to fit the time period. He was a fan of the graphics used in Battlezone and he designed abstract landscapes for the courses based on his inspiration. Marble Madness stood out from other arcade games because it was not drawn on the pixel level instead of information that was stored in a heightmap array. The graphics were then created by a ray-tracing program and the heightmap was determined by the appearance of the course on the screen. Cerny used a technique called spatial anti-aliasing to give the graphics a smoother appearance. He had planned for a lot of designs to be within the game including black hole traps, bumps, and breakable glass supports which would serve as obstacles within the game. These elements would not work or would not appear as Cerny had wanted them too. If you were wondering What is Marble Madness A brief history and how to play it. This has given you some insight into this incredibly fun arcade game.
Know Street fighter 2, History and Gameplay
Gameplay
Marble Madness is an isometric platform game meaning it is a game that is shown in three dimensions and polygonal 3D graphics. In the game, you control the marble by using a trackball and you guide this marble through six courses that have obstacles and enemies within a time limit. Home versions of the game use game controllers with directional pads. The player has a set amount of time to complete six maze-like isometric racecourses. Aside from the first race, if the player has time left on the clock from a previous race, then it will be carried over to the next race and the player will be given extra time too. This game can involve two players and if that happens, the two players will compete against each other. Extra time and bonus time will be given as rewards to the winner of the race. Players have separate clocks during the races. Each round consists of enemies and objects that are used to slow the player down. As each round is completed, the course of the maze gets more and more difficult. More obstacles and enemies will be involved as you progress and each course has a distinct theme. The first race is a short race, while the fifth race consists of polka-dot patterns and is oriented in an opposite direction compared to the other courses.
Fun Facts About Marble Madness
- Marble Madness has a lot of unique features which is why it is such a special arcade game.
- It uses the Atari System 1 Hardware which is an interchangeable system of circuit boards, artwork, and control panels.
- This game was one of the first arcade games to have a recognizable musical score and a true stereo sound.
- In 1996, Marble Madness was ranked #5 on the “Top 100 Games of All Time” by Next Generation.
- Then, in 2008, Guinness World Records listed this game as #97 as an arcade game with amazing technicality and cultural impact.
- Marble Madness has pixel graphics on a 19-inch Electrohome G07 model CRT monitor and uses a MOS Technology 502 system to control audio and coin operations.
- A Motorola 68010 central processing unit is used and it was one of the first games to use an FM sound chip. This sound chip allows the music to be in synchronization with the game’s on-screen action.
- Another interesting fact about the game is that Bob Flanagan and Mark Cerny had collaborated on a game before Marble Madness. It was based on Micheal Jackson’s Thriller but the project was canceled and they ended up working on the project Cerny had in mind, which was Marble Madness.
- It only took 10 months to develop this game and Cerny was fascinated with miniature golf and this is why he wanted to create a contoured path for the ball. Cerny was also inspired by racing and wanted this to be implemented in the game and even though there were technological limitations, Cerny was still able to make use of his idea by making the game’s objective to be a race against time. Cerny had a great image in his head of how he wanted the game to be like but he had to design Marble Madness with the company’s goals in mind. He kept the company’s goals in mind while also implementing his own ideas into the game.
What is Contra? A brief history, how to play it and more
Conclusion
Marble Madness was without a doubt, a game that had changed history forever. It had so many amazing designs and features that had not been seen before in other arcade games. This is one of the reasons that it is so unique and has been such a successful game. Mark Cerny and Bob Flanagan were amazingly smart programmers that were definitely ahead of their time. This is why they could not implement a lot of their ideas and designs but this did not stop Marble Madness from being the big success that we know it as today. Marble Madness can be played online and is still a favorite to many people.