Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.
Checking out the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Boom Blox, I've got to admit it looks like a good time. And God knows any decent additions to the Wii's anemic library are a good thing. But one not particularly surprising thing about Blox is the degree of cartooniness in the presentation. There's nothing wrong with that, and granted, action/puzzle games have been cartoony more or less ever since technology started to allow it, but in the distant past, there were other stylistic options. Here's one:
When I was a kid, Marble Madness freaked me out. It wasn't cartoony, it was just this weird, abstract, dark world; I used to imagine, playing it, that I was actually exploring the inside of the microchip itself that the game was printed on. That austerity turns out to have been intentional. In a 2002 interview with Bernhard Kirsch, the proprietor of the internet's sole dedicated Marble Madness homepage, designer Mark Cerny explains, "I was hoping that the world of Marble Madness would be a completely synthetic universe, with as little reference to our world as possible. And yes, there was a huge M.C. Escher influence."
Cerny was only seventeen when he designed Marble Madness; in the years since, he's worked on some very successful games, including Crash Bandicoot, but nothing as distinctive. Without his help, Atari developed a Marble Madness sequel in 1991, but it was never released. Marble Madness 2: Marble Man anthropomorphized the marbles and added a variety of real-world obstacles; Cerny did not approve: "It seems to me that it didn't quite follow up on the original Marble Madness concept… [O]ne of the Marble Madness rules was that everything in the game was somewhat abstracted, including the environments and enemies. Marble Man, on the other hand, had enemies such as tomatoes, knives and forks."
Coincidentally, while I was reading up on Marble Madness for this post, I found a Wikipedia comment suggesting that Steven Spielberg had a Marble Madness machine in his offices in the '80s. If that's true, maybe on his next outing he'll take a cue from this classic and give us something a little more mysterious than Boom Blox.
[Thanks to The Marble Madness Homepage.]