Marble it Up: 7 Years Later

Yo, Marble!

September 29, 2018
That was the release date for Marble it Up.

It's no coincidence that they repeated their strategy with Marble Blast Ultra, releasing a game on a new system with a small online library, it's a guaranteed success! But as a consequence, I feel like that gave the community, and maybe the devs themselves, the delusion that we're a buncha underdogs in the industry, and by community, I mean specifically Jean.

This is a whole subject in itself, but the wrap up is that we're standing on the same line as arcade racers and quake players, we're irrelevant in the games industry. Not to say we shouldn't stop trying, but instead to expect the expected rather than let the past delude us. But hey, maybe if the game industry collapses, we might get what we want, just like how killing yourself will cure you of the common cold!

Tangent aside, Im not here to give a history lesson, not yet atleast, instead, I wanna gather the community's thoughts about the Marble it Up series.

Marble it Up definitely left some sorta impact, plus a reality check with Ultra's release. The devs clearly had bigger plans for this series, but given the risk assessment, they've decided to cash in rather than spend anymore time on developing a sequel. Despite being hardcore for this genre, we weren't the intended audience, even though it seemed like it with how active they were in our community. It's a riskier return if they appeased people like us, which is unfortunately a common industry strategy that leads to general changes, for better or for worse (Im looking at you Saints Row and Yakuza.)


So that leaves us with the present: Classic and Ultra...and maybe Mayhem if you're one of those Apple freaks.
They have their differences. Maybe you prefer one over the other, I certainly do.

What do we all think? Were the levels fun to play through? What about the art direction? Were the marble physics fun to fuck around with? Were they disorienting? Or just not fun at all?
In the case of Ultra, what do you think of the multiplayer? Did you enjoy the variety of gamemodes or were you solely a gem hunt mark? Or did it not click with you at all?

I'd love to hear from every perspective, this means speedrunners, level artists, completionists, or the casuals. Whether you found your start here or in MIU.

Now I may not be the Heart Vault, nor am I the Colmesh god, but Im kinda expecting more than three whole people to respond to this.
I know most of you have an opinion on this, you won't shut the fuck up about your thoughts whenever its randomly brought up in the server.

Warning, my opinion is right under this spoiler.

well i never played MIU but it looks very good, But like idk why it needs to be like MBU, if its out of stock, then idk abt that.

RaphaXP wrote:

well i never played MIU

THEN DON'T RESPOND IF YOU HAVE NOTHING RELEVANT TO SAY!! DO YOU HAVE TO WRITE SOME BULLSHIT IN EVERY RECENT THREAD YOU SEE?!

sorry

Well I would consider myself a "casual player." I loved Marble Blast Gold and its fan-made mods, so I bought Marble It Up! in late 2018. I played it on my Mac, since that's what I used for MBG.

But right away, it just didn't feel right. The physics are so slow, and after playing MBG obsessively for four years, departure from those physics really messed with my head. Even after turning off the thing where the marble doesn't stay in the center of the screen (I need the marble in the same place all the time in order to play properly), the slowness, reduced gravity, and speed cap were just too annoying to get used to. I was really bad at the game and didn't find it fun to play. I gave it a few shots several months apart, but I always hit a breaking point at the Chapter 2 level "Wave Pool" (at least I think that's what it's called). It wasn't a hard level, but for some reason that's always when I said "Screw it, this isn't fun and I'm not going to keep playing if I'm not having fun."

Consequently, I didn't ever explore Marble It Up! Ultra or any other levels beyond that one in Chapter 2. I just don't think it would be worth my time or sanity, especially when PQ is free and runs natively on my Apple Silicon Mac, and has better physics. Also, we have so many good custom levels on Marbleland now that PQ is never going to get boring for me the way MIU was before it got frustrating.

I bought the game ~2 years ago now (and also bought the physical Switch version for one of my younger family members who liked it). The levels can be fun (my favourite is "All Downhill From Here" by Threefolder) but there are lots of bullshit levels as to be expected; not Marble Blast Platinum levels of bullshit though. Nowadays I boot up the game to play multiplayer mode because I find that more fun than the singleplayer campaign. It really sucks that the developers have neglected the game since Ultra came out; custom levels were pretty broken up until February 20, 2026, almost 3 years after release. Also, that $100 poster they put out was lame as hell. It's a perfectly fine game if you just really want more Marble Blast but it's not one I come back to a lot.

MIU is incredible in my opinion. The aesthetic is beautiful (those skyboxes nnnngg), the levels are super fun for the most part (Chapter 1 of Ultra is a near-masterpiece to me), the speedrunning videos that have come out of it have been a lot of fun to watch—I never played any of the multiplayer modes and don't know much about the scene in general, but I've heard great things. My experience with the game was great.

The biggest downside for me though was it... simply isn't Marble Blast. The physics are the main piece here, but the other thing I don't see mentioned very much is that it's a hell of a lot of fun to mod Marble Blast—the distance between player and creator is significantly shorter than with MIU, which feels more polished and curated, making it a better retail product but not necessarily the same same kind of long-term sandbox.

DoxtonPink wrote:

the delusion that we're a buncha underdogs in the industry

I'm not sure about delusion... I think it just depends on what we're measuring. The marble genre is pretty niche in today's industry, and MIU had a very exciting prime in a time where indie game development is everywhere. Our community lasting nearly 25 years isn't nothing either—the way we've quietly kept ourselves comfortably above the water for so long, essentially without any large-scale financial support, is incredible. I love our little corner of the internet and I'm happy to stay "irrelevant"—I wouldn't trade anything in the world for what we've had. Great time to be underdogs.

Nockess wrote:

I love our little corner of the internet and I'm happy to stay "irrelevant"—I wouldn't trade anything in the world for what we've had. Great time to be underdogs.

That's a really good way to put it. Marble It Up feels kind of "big" and "mainstream". With PQ being a fanmod of a fanmod of a 2003 game, it's definitely removed enough from the mainstream to feel more personal and rewarding when I play it and interact with the community.

And yes, Marble Blast makes a great creative sandbox but I also find it to be just so much more replayable overall than what I've experienced of MIU. Like I said before, the custom levels and multiplayer in particular (as well as the game being free and not requiring specialized hardware anymore) are huge factors keeping me playing. I guess it has great replayability because it's a great creative sandbox.

I've enjoyed reading you guys' thoughts about the game! Around three whole people responded to this, hopefully more will come to meet the "more than" threshold.

NF wrote:

the slowness, reduced gravity, and speed cap were just too annoying to get used to. I was really bad at the game and didn't find it fun to play.

The speed cap was another common complaint I've heard. I don't know if this is in-terms of the marbles not being tied to the framerate, or it having a limited value that it can't exceed. I'm going to assume it's the latter.

Yeah, it's a dumb implementation, though it might be a result of Unity's limitations, I do recall the devs talking about how the marble would phase through the interior if it exceeded a specific speed, I remember this to be a common issue in the level Stratosphere before they patched it.

It's funny because they have a buncha "Black Diamond" adjacent levels where you're incentivised to go as fast as you can, yet you're restricted by a limitation on your marble.

enderman0125 wrote:

It really sucks that the developers have neglected the game since Ultra came out; custom levels were pretty broken up until February 20, 2026, almost 3 years after release. Also, that $100 poster they put out was lame as hell.

Yeah I don't know what their game plan was with those posters. If it were up to me, I would've chucked in a bag of marbles.

I can kinda understand why they neglected the game though, between Classic and Ultra were a buncha tactics they've tried to guarantee some return with the game, one that comes to mind is their Apple Arcade deal. That was during the phase where every company wanted to put their foot in the game industry, rest in piss Stadia. It's what led to them carrying the losing hand by the time their contract expired, because it came down to whether a price should be attached to the expansion.

What they did was a noble gesture, you got both versions of the game, but in return, the community aspect was relegated to the crossplay multiplayer session only, leaving the Steam Workshop broken until recently. The former, I suspect, was a temperature check on whether this game is worth their time.

Nockess wrote:

but the other thing I don't see mentioned very much is that it's a hell of a lot of fun to mod Marble Blast—the distance between player and creator is significantly shorter than with MIU, which feels more polished and curated, making it a better retail product but not necessarily the same same kind of long-term sandbox.

I haven't really thought of that! It didn't really help that the only means of level creation was shuttered during Ultra's release, so the only way someone could be creative with the game is via their own marble.

I don't know if this is because of Unity, or the online functionality and its crossplay, but I haven't seen many modifications for this game, probably because its a bitch to work with. With Classic being abandoned, I thought they'd be some kinda renaissance with modifying it, like restoring the leaderboards and challenges or...fuckin...idk, a project M type mod that tweaked the physics? Im talking outta my ass here, I don't know what that whole infrastructure is, but I can't imagine it being as easy as modifying Marble Blast.

I guess this all hinges on whether the devs are willing to open source this game, which is just as likely as them finding the Marble Blast source codes, or us finding any of MBP's pre-replicated levels.

It'd probably help if I actually went out of my way to contact the Collective about their development cycle, they'd probably be willing to share what they got so Im not constantly speculating. Maybe I'll get around to doing that if I find the time, which thankfully Im getting plenty of these days.

Nockess wrote:

I'm not sure about delusion... I think it just depends on what we're measuring-...-Our community lasting nearly 25 years isn't nothing either—the way we've quietly kept ourselves comfortably above the water for so long, essentially without any large-scale financial support, is incredible.

It is impressive that we've stayed up for this long, and Im hoping whoever comes after us keeps that same energy, Im just irked by how some people see the past in rose-tinted glasses. Whenever people measure success, they often never factor the circumstances of the time, this extends past our own community by the way, if you know you know.

Im not very familiar with Marble Blast Gold's reception, though I imagine it being pre-installed on Macs helped it garner an audience. I don't know if it had much of an impact on RealArcade, Yahoo! Games, or whatever game distribution had it.

In terms of Marble Blast Ultra though, this is a working theory that I mentioned in the post itself, but its success hinged on how early it arrived on the 360. If it came out any later, at a point where the library has more games than the PS Triple, then it would've been seen as underrated at best. Bottom line, they succeeded through timing.

Would that factor change anything about the creation of InstantAction? I don't really think so, InstantAction was its own ambitious project, its failure stemmed from it being too early. In terms of marbles, I don't imagine there'd be as much players converting from Ultra to Online as there were back then, instead, maybe IA could be a gateway for Marble Blast's first proper exposure? It's all speculation.

There's also the fact that most people back then clamoured to every second they had on the computer, it was the internet's only point of entry before smartphones became more accessible and companies started prioritising them. There were more guys that formed their own space for their demographics, whether it be a social game or a forum about your favourite thing, some eventually growing into companies, which later got bought by conglomerates. There's also us, our age, how we spend our time, what we prioritise over other things.

Basically what Im saying is there's many factors that must align for us to recapture that good ol' Y2K energy, it's not just a SINGULAR SPECIFIC thing. It's not about whether we have a recognisable name, we make the mutliplayer the first choice on the menu, or if some online celebrity mentioned us, hell, FIVE different youtubers did (Nick "Hey baby wanna get this Polygon dick up your mouth? What do you mean consent?" Robinson, Simpleflips, Oneyplays, Patricia "Everyone's into incest dipshit it came free with your fuckin' childhood trauma" Taxxon, Videogamedunkey) yet we've barely seen any notable growth.

We've reached a point of the internet where everything's gotta be all-purpose, it can't be a service designated for a specific demographic anymore, that's risky, we gotta put everyone together and hope they play nice. A transaction stream must be maintained, whether by peddling dangerous misinformation or via planned obsolescence. There's no longer any opportunity for us to create shit because those bigger than us will just snatch it and claim it as their own, and it hasn't gotten any easier now that LLMs are using our limited earthly resources just to scrape our own words and images. It's a rapist mentality.

Granted, if those conglomerates decided to one day shoot themselves in the head, their tentacles would retract from every sector of our lives and the internet would become vast again. The opportunity for creation will be left on us, though it hinges on whether we're willing to come at it with risks rather than safe bets, and if an audience is willing to put the effort to find what they like.

It's easier for them to click on a website that plays Marble Blast rather than go through the effort of downloading a software to play that same game, not to mention if they even have a computer to begin with.

NF wrote:

That's a really good way to put it. Marble It Up feels kind of "big" and "mainstream". With PQ being a fanmod of a fanmod of a 2003 game, it's definitely removed enough from the mainstream to feel more personal and rewarding when I play it and interact with the community.

Marble it Up IS mainstream yet!

I mean it probably helps that MBP/PQ is built on the community, it's commendable that Matan and his team were able to build their own multiplayer with a box of scraps, funny since that was the initial plans for Marble Blast.

Everything leading up to this is the result of GarageGames' lenience on Platinum's existence at the time, the team's effort to build onto the engine and recontextualise the game in their own image, and the strength of our community.

We're lucky to have people like Vanilagy, which alongside Webport, revolutionalised level sharing. Not to mention people like Lily, Keppy, and recently MBC, who's efforts helped greatly in making level creation more accessible and easy to deal with.

I try to be more fair to our current development team, even if I have my own gripes. I always had the impression that even back then, Matan's team has a central HiGuy who carried the entire game post-launch. For us we have RandomityGuy, which is weird that it's always dudes with "Guy" in their name, its like how there's more than one "Xe" name who's a prodigy at speedrunning the game.

Are we going to be the last batch in this community? I hope not, I want others to carry this game. We won't live forever, so there's no point in hoarding everything to ourselves like we're a buncha aging politicans, there's gotta be some young blood who'll be tasked with carrying the torch. Not to say our time is coming up, but we're gotta be more open to the inevitable and fight it head-on.

WOAH RARE MAZIK FORUM POST WHAT IN THE FUCK??????

I sorta skimmed through a lot of what was said here, but figured I'd give my piece here too, hopefully won't take me too long to write. 

I've never personally had an issue with adjusting to different physics, with a new game in the genre from the creators of MBG and MBU, it's kind of something you have to expect. Interestingly enough, the physics of MIU are much closer to MBU than you may realize. They might even be the exact same. The tile size and the more "floaty" feel of the game just do a shockingly perfect job of masking just how similar the two games are, which would explain why more die hard MBU fans like the game than die hard MBG fans (That, and the fact that the MBU community for most of its life felt very fragmented). 

I've also done some speedrunning myself and interacted with the community a fair bit, there are some small mods out there that really make a big difference. The biggest one for Classic is the controller turning mod that allows keyboard players to have more of an "equal footing" with controller players. For both Ultra and Classic, there is a skin mod that allows you to have a custom skin in the game by replacing another skin file with the one you want shown. I've never used the latter myself since I've had my custom skin built into Classic (thanks devs) and I liked the select few marbles I used in Ultra. As of now the speedrunning scene in Ultra is still going decently well, with a few dedicated players still working on lowering their times and TAS WRs. For me, speedrunning has been fairly fun, especially pathfinding for Ultra levels, but I never found myself sticking with it long-term mostly because I had my sights set on bigger goals in the MB Community, and MIU, as fun as it was, was ultimately a distraction from those goals. 

The marble sphere as a whole is still relatively niche, so I think it's fair to say that both MIU and the MB Communities are underdogs. MIU no longer has the relevance it used to have, especially because they couldn't afford to sponsor big streamers for the release of Ultra. Ultra effectively had no advertising budget, so it was a miracle that MogSwamp did it for free for them, purely out of love for the game. Even then it didn't do much for the active community though, and the game unfortunately is in a state of slow decay. I'm not sure how much custom levels being fixed helped with the replayability of the game (it's been fixed for I think a few months now in the beta branch), but after a certain point I just decided I wouldn't check as frequently anymore and wait for some sort of end of service announcement in the discord or something. Marble Blast, while still niche, is definitely the bigger community at this point, as there is a lot more to do there as a player, and discussions in the discord server happen very frequently compared to the MIU server. It ultimately kinda comes down to your interpretation of how you perceive what an underdog is. In terms of the marble genre as a whole, everyone in this game genre is one. In terms of within the marble sphere itself, we are the big guys compared to MIU, which is strange to think about. 

Anyway, I had my fun with MIU while it lasted, and I don't wanna spend too long thinking about what I'm saying here, so I'll just leave it at this for now.

Mazik wrote:

I've never personally had an issue with adjusting to different physics, with a new game in the genre from the creators of MBG and MBU, it's kind of something you have to expect. Interestingly enough, the physics of MIU are much closer to MBU than you may realize. They might even be the exact same.

That's really why I was a bit lenient on the physics, even though its something I also felt throughout my playthrough.

I don't know if I'd say they're the exact same, MIU definitely feels a notch floatier than MBU, but I can see where you're coming from. It makes sense that they'd base their sequel on MBU (I mean, the expansion was called Ultra.) It does feel like the more popular mainline game out of the two.

Mazik wrote:

MIU no longer has the relevance it used to have, especially because they couldn't afford to sponsor big streamers for the release of Ultra. Ultra effectively had no advertising budget, so it was a miracle that MogSwamp did it for free for them, purely out of love for the game. Even then it didn't do much for the active community though, and the game unfortunately is in a state of slow decay.

To be fair they also built their studio out of loans, so they had an idea to how much they're worth as indies, plus their prior experience with maintaining GarageGames probably helped assess their range. I don't think there was a point prior to launch where they looked to crowdfunding, most of their advertisement relied on word of mouth instead of some form of advertisement budget.

I know Nick Robinson played a significant part in garnering their audience pre-launch, that felt like the first time a bigger youtuber ever mentioned MBU, they capitalised on this moment and carried it throughout the game's announcement and release. Everything post-launch was a strategy to keep the game afloat, long enough to peddle new content like chapter five and six.

It just sucks that they've screeched at the tail-end, I really feel like the Apple Arcade deal played some role in fucking up their momentum, this exclusivity delayed the needed expansion until their time on the stage was up. Im not expecting Marble it Up to survive just as long as a live service game, most games enter a period of relevancy before the next thing comes in, that's how they turn into cult-classics in the future. The Marble Collective did pretty well with the hand they've been dealt during Classic, Im just bummed out that Ultra didn't get the encore it deserved.

Mazik wrote:

Marble Blast, while still niche, is definitely the bigger community at this point, as there is a lot more to do there as a player, and discussions in the discord server happen very frequently compared to the MIU server-...-In terms of the marble genre as a whole, everyone in this game genre is one. In terms of within the marble sphere itself, we are the big guys compared to MIU, which is strange to think about.

It's weird how that works, despite having double the amount, there's barely any activity compared to our discord server. It's almost like the number of members in your server doesn't exactly dictate activity...or maybe Nardo Polo is running exclusive Multiplayer session every week without our knowledge, the server is just active in secret, who to say, it's no coincidence they call themselves a Marble Collective...