March 10, 2006
Losing my marbles again
I will always remember the first time I saw Marble Madness.
It was around 1984 and my main computer had been an Apple ][ (then ][+ and then ][e) since around 1979.
One day, I walked past a computer store that seemed to be attracting a lot of people. I made my way through the crowd and stared in disbelief at the beautiful game that was being shown. My jaw dropped at the resolution of the screen, the vibrant colors, the unbelievable animation and the mystifying musical score...
Of course, I had heard of the Amiga. Who hadn't? But at the time, the Atari 520 were all the rage for their cheap price and abilities that far surpassed those of the Mac Intosh.
This was going to change soon.
Days after seeing Marble Madness, I was still dreaming of the mesmerizing images that were etched in my memory, and deep inside, I knew that techno-lust had put an abrupt end to the relationship with my beloved Apple ][.
I was fortunate enough to have parents who understood the value of computers, so it only took a few months of bargaining to convince my Dad to buy an Amiga 1000. Quite a purchase at the time, but the potential was just too good to pass up.
Needless to say that I absolutely had to try this Marble Madness clone called Rolling Madness 3D. This game has pretty much been coded and drawn by one person called Luca Elia, who reproduced the game on Windows on OpenGL. Even though today's technology certainly makes this kind of game easier to program than 25 years ago, I still have to bow to Luca's skills: Rolling Madness 3D is extremely faithful to the original (including the music) and he even threw in a few personal touches, such as a few extra views.
Thanks, Luca!
Posted by cedric at March 10, 2006 10:21 PM
Wow, that brings back memories. I spent far too much time playing Marble Madness against my brother on the C64.
Posted by: Charles Miller at March 10, 2006 11:05 PMIf you're a fan of the Marble Madness music, there are some very nice remixes out there. For example:
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR00755/
Atari 400 and 800? Are you sure you don't mean the Atari 520 ST? According to http://oldcomputers.net/atari520st.html it was introduced 6 months before the Amiga 1000.
Posted by: Pierre Samanni at March 11, 2006 03:21 PMOops, you're right of course Pierre. Then again, I warned everyone with the title of this blog entry :-)
The first time I saw Marble Madness, it was as an arcade cabinet, back in '84.
Though the graphics looked good, the music and sound effects were what made it so different to me.
After all the gfx were only 336x240 (though probably bit-mappeds as opposed to tiled), but this had already been seen before. But the sound...
All this makes me wanna start MAME and clean the dust out of my XArcade!
PS - Cedric, it is 520 *ST*, not 520 :)
Posted by: Laurent at March 13, 2006 02:34 AMIs there a version for Mac OS X?
Posted by: Thierry Janaudy at March 13, 2006 11:24 AMI never saw the original, but I can see why you were fascinated.... What's a decent score to aspire to?
Posted by: George Petrov at March 13, 2006 01:22 PMI also remember playing Marble Madness on my Amiga 500. Its really fun with 2 players too. Recently I tried running it on WinUAE, and it works really well.
Posted by: Simon at March 14, 2006 07:23 PMInspired perhaps by Marble Madness, for the PC and I think XBox Live Arcade now: Marble Blast
http://www.garagegames.com/products/15
Posted by: Mike Jasnowski at March 22, 2006 10:41 AMTrackballs is another wonderful Marble Madness inspired game: http://trackballs.sourceforge.net/
It comes with a built in map editor and you can script your own tracks in scheme :)
Some years ago I was looking for a present to a (geekish) close friend. I found some panned composed screenshots of Marble Madness on the web (http://www.bodenstaendig.de/marble/hints.htm). I went to a professional printing service and had the first level printed in poster size on thick glossy paper. I had to change three printing services until I found the quality I needed, and I had to work with the printing guy for a while to find which of the levels had the better colors for printing on that particular device (the colors for levels 2 and 3 didn't look quite right in printing).
I had it framed, and it looked so beautiful that it's actually nice to look at even for non-geeks. Some day I'll make another copy for my own office.