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The (Marble) Madness of Mark Cerny
In 1983, game designer Mark Cerny worked on a game that had dynamic 3D environments, including bumps in the floor that would chase your character. It also, at one point, was to use either a touchscreen or a motorized trackball that provided resistance feedback to correspond to onscreen events. Obviously, none of these things worked out at the time. But the game did manage to make it out, if in a less grandiose form than originally intended, and on more modest hardware than the revolutionary arcade board Cerny had in mind. And the scaled-down version found an audience as Marble Madness. During a GDC postmortem for the classic game, Cerny said that the concept came about because the post-crash game market (and Atari) demanded totally unique concepts with two-player functionality. Two players meant twice as many coins per play, after all. And so Cerny set about with a minigolf-inspired game that used new 3D hardware -- which eventually ended up 2D, with a new "budget" arcade board that used interchangeable cartridges and afforded a bit more storage space. Cerny gave an abstract look to the game, with enemies like Slinky creatures and transparent blobs (the transparency was simulated by drawing the floor grid onto the enemy sprite). So he was understandably irritated when the cabinet designers decided to make the trackball controller a smiley face. Eventually, they reached a compromise, with a sort of smiling character on the panel, but not quite a face, and not on the trackball itself. After the year or so of design, Cerny and Atari ended up with a hit -- for about six months. Sales dropped off, he said, because the game could be completed in four minutes. He lamented not spending more time designing levels after getting the tech in place; at eight minutes, it could have remained a hit, he said.
Marble Madness creator Mark Cerny to be inducted into AIAS Hall of Fame
It may have been a quarter century since Mark Cerny's groundbreaking arcade game Marble Madness was first developed, but this year the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will give the influential developer an induction into its Hall of Fame. On February 18 in Las Vegas, Cerny will become the 13th member of the AIAS' small club -- a club that includes development bigwigs like Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto, among others. For those of you who don't know, Cerny's been hard at work behind the scenes of some of our favorite games throughout the years. The developer's had a hand in everything from Sonic 2 through God of War 3, with his influential "Cerny Method" of tenacious development being passed down to modern day big boys like Insomniac's Ted Price and Naughty Dog's Evan Wells. "Mark has left an indelible mark on all of the games he's been a part of, the developers that he's collaborated with, and most importantly the individuals that he's worked along-side of," Wells said in the press release (warning: PDF link). For Cerny's part, he said he's "thrilled to accept this award" and humbly offloaded some respect to past colleagues that he's "had the pleasure to work with over the years." We're looking forward to witnessing the "Cerny Method" in action during his acceptance speech, wherein he only allows himself 30 seconds to catch our interest before reevaluating the entire thing.
How many labyrinthine games do we really need?
Infendo has taken a snarky poke at the bevy of Marble Madness-y labyrinthine games gearing up for appearances on the Wii, and frankly, we too are surprised at the sheer number of such titles. Super Monkey Ball (obviously) already featured ball-rolling as one of the better parts of an uneven offering, and now three more upcoming games are centered around labyrinth puzzles. You know, we love rolling balls as much as the next guy, and certainly the gametype suits the console on many levels; the controller and the games-for-everyone theme are both well-supported here. But four games in the first year seems a little excessive. The Wiimote is also really well-suited to pointing and shooting, but we don't need four simple shooting gallery games, either. Sure, each game has different features. In Dewy's Adventure, the "marble" can go vaporous or crystallize into ice. Awesome. Except at the end of the day, it's still all about rolling around from here to there. This is really a pretty simple theme, and there are only so many variations on it. How many labyrinth games are we really going to buy? Does anyone expect to own all of these?
Japanese launch list unveiled
Nintendo of Japan's website offers a list of those purported sixteen launch titles...and they're not all necessarily what you would have expected. Take a look! The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Wii Sports (including boxing and bowling to round out tennis, golf, and baseball) WarioWare Wii Play Red Steel SD Gundam Revolution Tamagotchi Ennichi no Tastsujin (a drum game, along the lines of Taiko Drum Master) Trauma Center: Second Opinion Elebits Necro-nesia Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz Super Swing Golf Pangya Wing Island (demoed at E3 2006, the "plane game") Kororinpa (a Marble Madness-type game of some sort) Machariku Domino (a domino game) Interesting! It's good to see a rhythm/music game so early, and we'll post details on some of the more mysterious entries as we receive information.
