While browsing through the games on display to play at California Extreme back in 2023, I stumbled across this cabinet that said “Marble Madness II”. Having played the original and thinking it was fun and unique (and probably because no one was playing the cabinet at the time I found it) I decided to give it a try. Laura happened to be near me at the time, and since the game offered not one, but THREE player support, we hopped in.
Little did we know we were playing an unreleased prototype game. Lesser still we were playing on one of potentially three known Marble Man: Marble Madness II machines to even exist. Apparently the game was developed as a sequel to the original Marble Madness, but ended up planning to release in 1991, a full 7 years after the original game released, and at the beginning of Street Fighter II’s revolution of fighting games and the arcade scene. Given the landscape and the risk involved in releasing a game against Capcom’s juggernaut that is itself a sequel to a game basically a decade old proved too risky for developers Atari so they canned the project before full release.
While I completely understand and think it was the right choice to not mass-produce this game given the competition, it is sad that the world didn’t really get to see Marble Madness II, because the game was honestly a blast! We were laughing the entire time we played! Just like the original game your goal is to make it to a goal area, navigating your marble between obstacles, over chasms, avoiding enemies, and with more than one player now racing against your friends! The sequel had a lot more variety than I can recall from the first game, and this cabinet sported controls sticks as opposed to the series’ signature trackball controller, which made things a bit more chaotic ironically enough.
Being a prototype and unreleased game, the cabinet wasn’t all that exciting. There was a fully detailed marquee, complete with what appears to be the titular Marble Man front and center. The much more animated characterizations of the games enemies really scream early 80s in their design. I didn’t grow up during that time, and instead had to consume all of these games and media after the fact, largely thanks to my brothers, and there is a sort of unique charm to them… for better and for worse sometimes.
Apparently Marble Madness II was almost left in the unreleased arcade scene, forever condemned to be a thought and never see the light of day to a wider audience. All of that changed in 2022, when the game’s ROM was finally dumped online, and eventually brought into emulation software so the game could be enjoyed by a much wider audience than just the folks that show up to California Extreme every year. I’m definitely one to promote game preservation, and when something as entertaining as this finally gets its due preservation I am happy.
*Played at California Extreme 2023 in Santa Clara, CA
(PS: Major shout-out to the Lost Media Wiki, which gave a very detailed history on Marble Man: Marble Madness II, which I referenced a lot in my tiny write-up here. Read their post here and enjoy the time travel machine that is their blog!)
