Marble Madness - How it was made presentation

ARCHON

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Here is a very interesting talk by the creator of Marble Madness, Mark Cerny about how he made one of my favorite games, Marble Madness :

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014629/Classic-Game-Postmortem-MARBLE

The camera starts off angled to the right, but they fix it after about 10 minutes.

I loved marble madness in the arcade, but I also had it on the Amiga1000. The amiga version used the mouse to control the marbles which worked pretty good.

For the other programmers out there, this is the first game to use ray tracing as a pre processing effect to create game levels. IMO this game was about 5 years ahead of its time. It should be respected more than any other game of its time.

Apologies if this has been posted here before. I did a search here before i posted this.

-ARCHON (I only have a Star Castle arcade machine in my basement at the moment)
 
Here is a very interesting talk by the creator of Marble Madness, Mark Cerny about how he made one of my favorite games, Marble Madness :

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014629/Classic-Game-Postmortem-MARBLE

The camera starts off angled to the right, but they fix it after about 10 minutes.

I loved marble madness in the arcade, but I also had it on the Amiga1000. The amiga version used the mouse to control the marbles which worked pretty good.

For the other programmers out there, this is the first game to use ray tracing as a pre processing effect to create game levels. IMO this game was about 5 years ahead of its time. It should be respected more than any other game of its time.

Apologies if this has been posted here before. I did a search here before i posted this.

-ARCHON (I only have a Star Castle arcade machine in my basement at the moment)

I enjoy my Marble Madness a lot,the graphics,sound,and game play are just awsome.
 
I loved the NES version as a kid. I only recently got to play the arcade version.
 
Sweet I'm definitely going to be watching this. :) Loved Marble Madness on the NES, but never got to play the arcade verison...yet. ;)
 
Have to watch this in its entirety later, thanks for posting.

A couple interesting things I've heard him say before that may or may not be in this discussion:

The safe path(s) for the marble are all hardcoded data and have nothing to do with the level designs - meaning a couple of things: a marble falls off the edge because the position data dictates this, not the actual visual construction of the playfield. If the level designs were hacked or altered, they would not be playable (without a thorough reconstruction of all the position data). This may contribute to why we've never seen a level hack, something many would find extremely interesting and desirable.

The intention was to release this on a new hardware platform that would be much more stunning, but Atari wanted it scaled back to execute on their new System One hardware and be its flagship "kit."

Mark quickly realized after release that it should have had twice as many levels, as avid gamers quickly learned how to finish all the stages, moved on and revenues dropped sharply.
 
Mark quickly realized after release that it should have had twice as many levels, as avid gamers quickly learned how to finish all the stages, moved on and revenues dropped sharply.

Yes, I have the game at home and this is my biggest complaint. What I do is keep it on the harddest setting to reduce boredom.

That and keep waiting year after year for MM2 to get leaked...
 
The actual arcade game is isometric, which has no perspective. Which means things dont get smaller in the distance.

But this marble madness clone "rolling madness 3d" is in full 3d, with perspective.


2149028232_0859fc00e0_o.jpg
(3d perspective)
marble_madness_set_2.png
(original isometric)


rolling_madness_3d_01.jpg
(3d perspective)
marble-madness-ipad.png
(original isometric)
 
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Yes, I have the game at home and this is my biggest complaint. What I do is keep it on the harddest setting to reduce boredom.

That and keep waiting year after year for MM2 to get leaked...


Ah yes MM2. Jim Newlander (atari) visited my arcade to talk about testing a new proto called "primal rage" and I asked him about MM2. He said it didn't even pass phase one and there would be no regional tests. From then on I knew it wasn't even worth looking at.

After hearing mark's post mortum, it seems the graphic tiles ARE directly associated with environmental conditions (i.e., a sloped tile will cause the marble to roll downward), so unless this data is matched up in a complicated way, it stands to reason new static playfields could be created and perhaps even the enemies could be placed differently. I'd love to be in on a project to create an unofficial sequel of six new stages, but don't have the background to attempt it. And Jeff C (DK2) was less than receptive to the idea.
 
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