The PC version of Marble Madness runs under MS-DOS and was developed by Will Harvey (and a small team of other people at Sandcastle), and was published by Electronic Arts in 1987.

Since they were all coded by the same person, the Commodore 64, Atari ST, Apple II, Apple IIgs and PC versions are all very similar. This one also contains the hidden secret level accessible from the first course, although don’t get too excited about it because it’s not very good.

As this is a relatively early MS-DOS game there are CGA and Tandy versions – both only using four colours on-screen at once, but the Tandy version does look a lot better because it at least varies those colours between levels. The CGA version uses the garish cyan, pink, white and black on every level. I also found that the Tandy version ran faster and smoother too, which made it more difficult.

One significant problem with the DOS version is the fact that the collision detection is suspect. You often fall off the course when it looks like you’re fine, and you stay on the course when you think it looks like you’re going off. Even worse, you sometimes blatantly fall through the floor repeatedly in some places, which are obvious bugs. For me, the vacuum cleaners in the CGA version did nothing (they didn’t even affect the marble at all), but in the Tandy version they were working fine and were hugely troublesome (which they should be). I also passed through the hammers on the fourth course, in both versions, without them affecting the marble. I don’t know if this was an issue with the version I had or if there were bugs in the finished game.

Overall, the DOS version of Marble Madness is okay. It’s not the worst conversion of the game I’ve played, but it’s not that good either. If you’re going to play Marble Madness for the first time I’d suggest you try the original arcade version, the Japanese Megadrive version, or the North American/European Megadrive/Genesis version. They’re all more fun than this.

More: Marble Madness on Wikipedia