Insert Coin: Marble Madness

“Marble Madness is an isometric platform game in which the player manipulates an onscreen marble from a third-person perspective. The player controls the marble's movements with a trackball, though most home versions use game controllers with directional pads. The aim of the game is for the player to complete six maze-like, isometric race courses before a set amount of time expires. When a player completes a race, the remaining time is added to the next race's allotted time. The game also allows two players to compete against each other.”

Yeah. If you wanna find out just how hard someone can hit play this game with them. This one was of the most aggravating video games ever created. This isn't like Tetris where you can go “Oh, this goes there and I will win the round” and you go too far and fuck up and lose. No. Marble Madness seemed as if it was set up to make you fail and lose your shit completely. The sad thing is that I rented this game three weekends in a row from the video store. RIP Cal-Fal Video.

I'm sure some young kids are reading this (you have terrible parents if they let you internet to the point you even find my blog) and wondering how a game about marbles rolling on the screen is fun let alone enough to drive someone to the point of wanting to commit murder. Its simple. This was the 80's. This is what we did for fun. We played games that made us flip the fuck out and were close to unbeatable. Most games were built with a system that had to be learned to be beaten. Not this. It just existed. Like the aye aye. Jesus, that thing is creepy. Maybe because its large eyes remind me of marbles!

Oh, the madness!

There was an ad campaign where it said “It could drive you to madness!” and it was true. I didn't curse as a child so I would just moan, sigh loudly, kick the Nintendo, or pout like a little bitch-boy because I couldn't make a marble go up a ramp before the time ended. Oh, the time! The time went from one level to the next so if you finally made it with a few seconds left it would add to the next which sounds cool until you realize that this new level had more enemies and was far harder than the last! This game was the devil.

Mind you, all you're working with is a NES controller which only had four directions which is kinda counter-intuitive when manipulating a ball. What did the buttons do? Damned if Ill remember. Maybe sped the ball up. I don't know. What I do know is that there are ways to play this online now but fuck that. This game is a level of stress I just don't need in my life right now.

My heart rate increased just by looking at this picture.

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