Marienbad was a 1962 Polish puzzle mainframe game created by Elwro engineer Witold Podgórski in Wrocław, Poland for its Odra 1003.

Elwro did not produce or advertise the game, though Podgórski recreated it at the Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology in Warsaw).

Witold Podgórski was a recent graduate of the Wrocław University of Technology, having majored in electronic engineering and specialized in mathematical machines.

[8] While sitting in a multi-hour lecture for his obligatory military study class, Podgórski decided to decipher the Marienbad algorithm and save it to a binary system which could be understood by computers.

[4] He programmed the game for the first prototype of the Odra 1003, then in development and scheduled to be installed in the Board of the Topographic General Staff of the Polish Army in Wrocław.

[5] The game, intended for logical duels,[4][9] was developed solely by Podgórski by creating the algorithm, writing a list of instructions which were printed on sheets the size of postcards, and manually setting the initial state of each memory cell.

Mainframe computers were rare throughout the world and primarily located in government or military institutions or large corporations, so were generally unavailable for amusement purposes.

The university authorities supported this, as they wanted to forcibly remove the "nasty habit of harassing computers for logic games", which they believed should be used only for serious military purposes.

Wojciech Pijanowski [pl], who would later become the two-decade long host of Wheel of Fortune from the 1970s, proposed to Polish television a game show where players compete against a computer in nim on a Momik 8b minicomputer.

[5] Writing for Polish Bytes (Bajty Polskie), Bartłomiej Kluska asserts that as the only copy of the Odra 1003 is kept at the Museum of Technology in Warsaw in an inactive state, the original game of Marienbad no longer exists outside of the memory of players.

[13][14] In the research paper Gry komputerowe jako dziedzictwo kulturowe (Computer games as a cultural heritage) by Maria Garda, she notes that the game should be written about only in the past tense as the original elements have not been preserved, adding that while the Marienbad algorithm can be recreated in a new programming environment, reconstruction of the physical transistors of the original computer would be nearly impossible.

[18] Kluska notes, however, that it was preceded by "Kółko i krzyżyk", a version of tic-tac-toe written by Department of Mathematical Apparatus programmer Bogdan Miś in 1960 for the XYZ computer, using a chess-sized grid.

[9][21] Jacek Głowacki of Gry Online stated that despite its obscurity, it should be considered the ancestor of the modern Polish video gaming industry, and that its existence and creation are worth remembering.