let's roll

When I was in junior high school in the mid-eighties, my friends and I would meet up after school and head down to Woburn center and blow rolls of quarters in the game room at the back of the local pool hall. When I say “pool hall”, I mean it in the true old-school meaning of the term. This was not the upscale “billiards parlour” of our present age, but a dark, dingy hole in the wall located on the second floor of a dilapidated retail building. Cigarette burns around the edges of the tables. Industrial carpeting mottled with stains of various origins and discolored by decades of accumulated ash. The clientele mostly consisted of mustachioed upperclassmen, killing time before moving on to either HVAC apprenticeships or lifetimes spent in and out of the Billerica House of Correction. The seediness of the place gave it an air of the forbidden irresistible to fifteen year old boys. Most of my friends weren't allowed to set foot in the place by their parents, which only added to the transgressive allure usually associated with sneaking into R-rated movies.

The game room was small, but stocked with some of the better games of the immediate post-crash era, providing my first experiences with Speed Rumbler, Renegade, Jackal, and the subject of today’s post, Atari’s Marble Madness.

The concept behind the game is perfectly simple; the player must navigate a virtual marble to the end of various obstacle courses within the allotted time. Real-world physical principles, such as gravity and momentum, are in force, and the use of a trackball controller for the interface gives players an immediate, intuitive connection to their spherical game-world avatar. Graphically, the game utilizes an isometric perspective, rendered in colorful detail yet abstractly minimalist; evoking some of the more bizarre Sesame Street shorts from 1970’s.

Brad Fuller and Hal Canon composed the game’s soundtrack, and I consider it to be some of the finest game music of the era. The tracks are very reminiscent of the works by the synth pioneers of the 60’s and 70’s, but with a MIDI kick to them. It may sound a bit primitive to those of you raised on full symphony orchestral redbook sound, but there’s something hauntingly pure and elegant about those old game scores. (I still think the original NES version of the Metroid theme is the best one.)

These tracks from Marble Madness appeared on an import eight-disc box set called Legend of Game Music 2 that I ran across a few months back. Since some of the tracks have very short runtimes, I bundled the entire set together into one .rar file.

Marble Madness Game Soundtrack (1984)