What is an IC Level?

I’ve been browsing around some of the Record pages for Marble Blast and the term IC Level has come up a lot. They are usually talked about around levels like Fork in the Road, Trapdoors, Marble Material Lab, Free Fall etc. These levels all have the theme of just being able to roll and jump in a straight line to the end and the only skill is the Start Pad timing. What are IC Levels exactly though? What does IC stand for? Why are some people considered better at them (like StewMan50) or worse (like Xedron claims) but it’s not based on skill?

IC stands for Internal Clock.

The better the computer, the better the in-game timer works. Basically, if the exact same run is played on two different computers, you can get two different times (albeit, off by a couple milliseconds).

Ah, thank you. That makes a lot of things make more sense. That brings up another question though. How do they decide what the right IC is for WRR times?

It's basically that whoever has the fastest internal clock, and can complete the level the fastest, gets the record. You may have read about certain small techniques to go faster on these small levels, such as Kalle's natural bounce trick, but most of the time things like that make any computer finish the level a couple hundredths faster, not just the best ones. Internal clock has a lot to do with frames per second, and for years Macs ran MBG at 167 FPS while Windows ran it at 64 FPS so Macs had a distinct advantage on IC levels. This has since been fixed and now FPS can be unlimited for MBG, giving Macs and Windows even chances.