RIP marbleblast.com

What happened?

Somewhere around 9AM on Feb 2, 2024, the server hosting marbleblast.com started showing signs of an infection. It isn't known exactly how it was attacked, but the OS and software running on it had not been updated for a number of years and it was inevitable that some botnet would succeed at exploiting it eventually. As a result, the site is currently offline as the team hosting it determine the next steps.

What is affected?

Anything hosted on the server behind marbleblast.com, namely:

What is not affected?

Was data lost?

No. That being said, the data is only really usable by the still-vulnerable software that was running on the site, so “putting it back up,” even in a read-only format, is not viable as it will just get attacked again in the same manner. Someone with access to the site can pull a copy of the Leaderboards' and Forums' data from the nightly backup, but trying to convert it to a format usable by the community will likely take a significant amount of time.

When is it going back up?

Unknown. At this point the amount of work required to restart the services is likely greater than anyone is willing to put in. Parts of it could recovered independently, though:

So realistically, the only part that would be truly difficult to recover is an interactive version of the forums. Not that they saw much use these last few years, but they were a significant source of knowledge about the game that was easily searchable.

So what do I do now?

Play PlatinumQuest

You can download the PlatinumQuest launcher for Windows Here

Play Marble It Up

You can play the spiritual successor of Marble Blast by the original devs called Marble It Up!. They have actual funding to maintain their infrastructure, at least for right now.

Play the Other Versions

` If you want that authentic Marble Blast Gold experience, there's the Marble Blast Gold Haxe Port (and Platinum or Ultra) and Marble Blast Webport. There's also OpenMBU, an “open source” (technically it's just source-available) rewrite of Marble Blast Ultra, by the OpenMBU team.