Marble Madness - Development

Development

Marble Madness was developed by Atari Games, with Mark Cerny as the lead designer and Bob Flanagan as the software engineer. Both Cerny and Flanagan handled programming the game. It uses the Atari System 1 hardware, an interchangeable system of circuit boards, control panels, and artwork. The game features pixel graphics on a 19 inch Electrohome G07 model CRT monitor, and uses a Motorola 68010 central processing unit (CPU) with a MOS Technology 6502 subsystem to control the audio and coin operations. Marble Madness was Atari's first game to use an FM sound chip produced by Yamaha, which is similar to a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and creates the music in real time so that it is in synchronization with the game's on-screen action. The game's music was composed by Brad Fuller and Hal Canon who spent a few months becoming familiar with the capabilities of the sound chip.

Cerny and Flanagan first collaborated on a video game based on Michael Jackson's Thriller. The project, however, was canceled and the two began work an idea of Cerny's that eventually became Marble Madness. Development lasted 10 months. Following the North American video game crash of 1983, video game development within Atari focused on providing a distinctive experience through the use of a unique control system and by emphasizing a simultaneous two-player mode. Cerny designed Marble Madness in accordance with these company goals. He was first inspired by miniature golf and captivated by the idea that a play field's contours influenced the ball's path. Cerny began testing various ideas using Atari's digital art system. After deciding to use an isometric grid, Cerny began developing the game's concept. His initial idea involved hitting a ball in a way similar to miniature golf, but Atari was unenthusiastic. Cerny next thought of racing games and planned for races on long tracks against an opponent. Technology limitations at the time were unable to handle the in-game physics necessary for the idea, and Cerny switched the game's objective to a race against time.

The Motorola CPU includes a compiler for the C programming language, which the two programmers were familiar with. After Atari had conducted performance evaluations, it approved usage of the language. Cerny and Flanagan's decision to program Marble Madness in the C language had positive and negative consequences. Atari games had previously been programmed in assembly language. The C language was easier to program, but was less efficient, so the game operates at the slower speed of 30 Hz instead of the normal 60 Hz frequency of arcade games at the time. Cerny decided to use a trackball system (marketed by Atari as Trak-Ball) to give the game a unique control system, and he chose a motorized trackball for faster spinning and braking when the in-game ball traveled downhill and uphill, respectively. As it was building the prototypes, Atari's design department informed Cerny that the motorized trackball's design had an inherent flaw—one of the four supports had poor contact with the ball—and the use of a regular trackball was more feasible. Additionally, Cerny had anticipated the use of powerful custom chips that would allow RAM-based sprites to be animated by the CPU, but the available hardware was a less-advanced system using ROM-based, static sprites.

These technical limitations forced Cerny to simplify the overall designs. Inspired by M. C. Escher, he designed abstract landscapes for the courses. In retrospect, Cerny partly attributed the designs to his limited artistic skills. He was a fan of the 3D graphics used in Battlezone and I, Robot, but felt that the visuals lacked definition and wanted to create a game with "solid and clean" 3D graphics. Unlike most other arcade games of the time, the course images were not drawn on the pixel level. Instead, Cerny defined the elevation of every point in the course, and stored this information in a heightmap array. The course graphics were then created by a ray tracing program that traced the path of light rays, using the heightmap to determine the appearance of the course on screen. This format also allowed Cerny to create shadows and use spatial anti-aliasing, a technique that provided the graphics with a smoother appearance. Cerny's course generator allowed him more time to experiment with the level designs. When deciding what elements to include in a course, practicality was a big factor; elements that would not work or would not appear as intended were omitted, such as an elastic barricade or a teeter-totter scale. Other ideas dropped from the designs were breakable glass supports, black hole traps, and bumps and obstacles built into the course that chased the marble.

Cerny's personal interests changed throughout the project, leading to the inclusion of new ideas absent from the original design documents. The game's enemy characters were designed by Cerny and Sam Comstock, who also animated them. Enemies had to be small in size due to technical limitations. Cerny and Comstock purposely omitted faces to give them unique designs and create a minimalistic appearance similar to the courses. Atari's management, however, suggested that the marble should have a smiley face to create an identified character, similar to Pac-Man. As a compromise, the cabinet's artwork depicts traces of a smiley face on the marbles. Flanagan programmed a three-dimensional physics model to dictate the marble's motions and an interpreted script for enemy behavior. As Marble Madness neared completion, the feedback from Atari's in-house focus testing was positive. In retrospect, Cerny wished he had included more courses to give the game greater longevity, but extra courses would have required more time and increased hardware costs. Atari was experiencing severe financial troubles at the time and could not extend the game's development period as it would have left their production factory idle.