It is a platform game in which the player must guide a marble through six courses, populated with obstacles and enemies, within a time limit.

A sequel was developed and planned for release in 1991, but it was canceled when location testing showed the game could not succeed in competition with other titles.

[1][2][3][4] Courses are populated with various objects and enemies, designed to obstruct the player, as well as track surfaces that make control of the marble more difficult.

[1][2][3][4] Marble Madness was developed by Atari Games, with Mark Cerny as the lead designer and Bob Flanagan as the software engineer.

[6] 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.

[2][8] The game's music was composed by Brad Fuller and Hal Canon who spent a few months becoming familiar with the sound chip's capabilities.

This format also allowed Cerny to create shadows and use spatial anti-aliasing, a technique that provided the graphics with a smoother appearance.

[2] 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.

[9] Cerny's personal interests changed throughout the project, leading to the inclusion of new ideas absent from the original design documents.

Cerny and Comstock purposely omitted faces to give them unique designs and create a minimalistic appearance similar to the courses.

[9] Flanagan programmed a three-dimensional physics model to dictate the marble's motions and an interpreted script for enemy behavior.

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.

[18][19] Electronic Arts released a mobile phone port in 2010 that includes additional levels with different themes and new items that augment the gameplay.

[2] In Japan, Game Machine listed Marble Madness on their May 1, 1985 issue as being the second most-successful upright/cockpit arcade unit of the month.

[3][25] In 2008, Levi Buchanan of IGN listed Marble Madness as one of several titles in his "dream arcade", citing the game's difficulty and the fond memories he had playing it.

[29] In 2008, Guinness World Records listed it as the number seventy-nine arcade game in technical, creative and cultural impact.

[3][8] British composer Paul Weir commented that the music had character and helped give the game a unique identity.

[33] Reviewing for Computer Gaming World, Roy Wagner stated that the Amiga version was superior to the arcade original.

[35] Bil Herd recalled that the Amiga version was so popular at Commodore International that employees stole the required memory expansion from colleagues' computers to run the game.

[36] Benn Dunnington of Info gave the Amiga version four-plus stars out of five, describing it as "a totally faithful adaptation", and hoped that a sequel was in development.

[2][31] Elements of Marble Madness were incorporated into the DIC Entertainment animated series Captain N: The Game Master episode "I Wish I Was a Wombatman".

[2][23] Development was led by Bob Flanagan who designed the game based on what he felt made Marble Madness a success in the home console market.

Because the market's demographic was a younger audience, Flanagan wanted to make the sequel more accessible and introduced a superhero-type main character.

Flanagan intended to address the short length of the first game and, with the help of Mike Hally, developed seventeen courses.

[44] Atari created prototypes for location testing, but the game did not fare well against more popular titles at the time such as Street Fighter II.