This Month in Marble Blast - March 2026

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Written by: Nockess
Category: News
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As the cold of the Northern Hemisphere takes its leave, March kicked off with a heater in this year’s Winter Warm-Up—and while the level building and speedrunning scenes were relatively quiet this past month, there’s still plenty to recap!

 

PlatinumQuest 2.12.0

PlatinumQuest 2.12.0 arrived with one of the biggest releases in quite some time: a native Linux build! The game is now available to play on all three major operating systems, which is a massive achievement considering that PlatinumQuest was heading towards a dooming uncertainty before the release of 2.10.0 revitalized it for modern hardware in late 2024.

 

That was, of course, only part of the update. 2.12.0 also brought more accurate Marble Blast Ultra graphics, a few new additions and a lot of adjustments to the official Gem Hunt map pool ahead of the 2026 Winter Warm-Up tournament (with timing that… could have been better), and, to no one’s surprise, a long list of bug fixes.

 

Just a week and a half later, 2.12.1 followed up with a flurry of improvements to the level editor—including the entire moving platform experience—thanks to Keppy.

 

If you want all the details, check out the changelog here!

 

Customs Roll Call

Three months of Customs Roll Call are already in the books, and March’s entry features the widest range of runners yet—eight total participants! Blasted, Connie, and TrueSlayer74 all make their debuts in the series.

 

If you still happen to be unfamiliar with this event, Customs Roll Call is a year-long speedrunning event where twelve levels are announced at the beginning of every month. Players spend the month grinding for the best times, which are then compiled into a video released with the next group of levels.

 

Here is the video for March! April's levels are found at the end of the post.

 

 

Custom Levels

March saw even fewer levels released compared to February, but still brought a handful of standouts and one long-awaited pack that more than made up for the quieter month.


Connie’s big release, appropriately titled “Connie’s Awesomesauce March Sextuple Release”, featured a pack of six levels that she had been working on since as early as November of last year, with some of the more creative platforming that the community has seen in recent months.

 

Speedrunning

Rather than focusing solely on world records, this section of the newsletter is more simply named “Speedrunning” as it allows for broader coverage of what this community does best: going fast.

 

Towards the end of the month, August released the sequel to his “PlatinumQuest Pathfinding” video from over eight years ago, featuring five runs with truly mindbreaking new paths. “Work in Progress” and “Dangerous Development” had already been showcased on the community channel, but the other three are just as insane. Don’t miss the mayhem on “Colored Tile Maze” at the end!

 

Meanwhile, Connie’s new level “Mas Movimiento”—one of the six in her new level pack—was immediately regarded as one of the most difficult custom levels out there. Nockess decided to prove a point by speedrunning it… the same day the level was released.

 

And all of a sudden, the number of new world records achieved this month took a drastic drop to… seven levels. That includes both standard singleplayer and Easter Eggs.

 

Marble Blast Platinum:

  • Frictional Ascent – 26.800 (berserk) – prev. 29.656 (Xedron)

  • Tunnel Visions – 14.111 (August) – prev. 14.170 (Xelna)

PlatinumQuest:

  • Deep Space Morphway – 49.920 (Powerjohn25) – prev. 50.646 (August)

  • Terrace Tundra – 236 (bobirika12) – prev. 229 (Mazik)

  • Platinum Construction Co. – 217 (Powerjohn25) – prev. 215 (Powerjohn25)

m2k’s two Easter Egg records both came on “Natural Selection”, one each on the Marble Blast Gold and Ultra versions. After the ridiculous tear that he has been on this year, his efforts culminated in a compilation of over 100 runs!

 

 

2026 Winter Warm-Up

The second annual Winter Warm-Up took place thanks to ShadowVisions' hosting it again. Just like in 2025, the tournament followed a double-elimination format with every match being best-of-three, save for the lower bracket and grand finals being best-of-five. The top four players from the pre-seed round earned byes into the second round of the upper bracket.

 

Frostfire backed up his #1 pre-seed placement into an undefeated run through the upper bracket and ultimately claiming his first tournament victory in nearly a decade, beating #2 seed Xedron in a six-game match featuring a 117-117 tie on “Skate Battle Royale”, until finally emerging as the winner on “Fun in the Sun”.

 

ShadowVisions, last year’s Summer Premier winner, secured third place. The top four was rounded out by yours truly, Nockess, after immediately losing to ShadowVisions, beating Kalle29 and heavy contenders MBOUltimate, Connie, and Icarus, and then falling once again to ShadowVisions. Since losing consecutive finals in the 2018 Summer Tournament and Festival of Champions, this felt like a long-overdue strong showing in knockout rounds after a few disappointing performances in recent years.

 

Nockess, Connie, and Icarus were the names who qualified for the 2026 Summer Premier Contender Division, along with theturk1234, who secured the final spot after a tiebreaker match where he narrowly won over Robert. The last four spots will be filled by the four highest pre-seed scores in the upcoming Summer Premier and will join ShadowVisions, Mazik, Frostfire, bobirika12, MBOUltimate, Xedron, Eguy, and Jean.

 

The tournament also served as a testing ground for the rest of the competitive season this year, as several maps—"Narrows" and "Foundry" by Endy, "Stingbee Valley" and "Galactic Islands" by Frostfire, and "Fractured Islands" by Connie—were trialed for potential inclusion in the official map pool moving forwards. It also marked the first use of HuntBot in a tournament, which has since added support for 1v1 rotations and free-for-all games, auto-scoring from in-game (rather than manual inputs), divisions and placement decay in the ladder, more.

 

Frostfire announced the FFA Palooza, a more casual one-day event where all matches will be played in groups of four. The free-for-all-based tournament, to be played in April, will consist of two portions:

  • The Main Schedule will be five rounds of two games each, where every player will face all other opponents exactly once. Players will earn five, three, two, or one point depending on their placement at the end of each game, meaning up to 10 points is attainable each round and up to 50 points in total.

  • The Knockout Rounds start with the four players at the bottom of the standings. The top two players will play against the next two players up the standing in the following game, and the system repeats until only four players remain, in which they will play with the same scoring 5-3-2-1 scoring system until a player outright wins a game after earning nine points.

 

New York Times Games

A couple of the beloved games from the New York Times made their way into the Marble Blast scene.

 

First was “Mardle”, inspired by Wordle and brought to the forums by DoxtonPink. It’s not quite the same as the original game, since Marble Blast just doesn’t have that many five-letter words in its lexicon, but there are thousands of levels out there, and the goal is to identify a level based on a single screenshot, often with very little to go off of.

 

 

If you’re reading this article, you should recognize immediately that this is “Learning to Roll”—that one’s easy! But the puzzles can get much harder, so jump on the forums thread and keep an eye out for the third week of puzzles.

 

The other game to catch on was Connections (grouping sixteen terms into four specific categories), with ShadowVisions kicking things off with his Gem Hunt-themed puzzle. From there, quite a few others joined in and started making their own puzzles as well! Here are a few:

And as a little treat, an extra puzzle from your writer, first seen here!

“The Platinum Team?” by Nockess

 

Miscellaneous

There has been renewed discussion about renaming PlatinumQuest—the platform as a whole, not the individual game. See how that clarification was necessary? That alone should give you an idea of why this has been an on-and-off conversation for the past few years. The current general consensus seems to be “Marble Blast Community Edition”, but share your thoughts if you have something to add!

 

Threefolder resurfaced after a few years since joining the Marble Collective to work on Marble It Up! Ultra. As part of improving his music production skills, he released “Technoforte”, a remix of Marble Blast Platinum’s iconic menu theme.

 

Finally, another major step to preserving Marble Blast history: the GarageGames forums—yes, the ones from the early 2000’s—have now been archived on MarbleBlast.com.

 

April Preview

That wraps up March!

 

The FFA Palooza is the only notable event on the docket for April, but the future has a tendency to reveal itself in ways we don’t expect. Happy April Fools!

 

And of course, the next set of levels for Customs Roll Call:

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