The original black and white Game Boy version of the classic Marble Madness was published by Mindscape in 1991. I’m not a hundred percent sure who developed it, but it could be Tengen as they are mentioned in the copyright small print on the back of the box and on the title screen.

Like a good chunk of Marble Madness conversions the Game Boy port does have some significant issues. The main one from my point of view are the obvious problems with the view priorities of the marble and the landscape. The marble can often be seen when it’s behind the landscape and the masking of the course graphics just doesn’t seem to work very well. Which is annoying because it’s fundamental to the game and should have been fixed before release.

The next major issue is the bare bones nature of this release. The game is missing many of the details from the original, like the course names and the timer introductions at the beginning of each race (which seems unnecessary to me). Of course this version of Marble Madness is missing the colour of the original, and it also lacks a high score table, but a bigger issue is that the game only has five levels, instead of the original six. The final race (Ultimate) is completely absent.

There are some playability issues too, like the suction pipes on level four being instant death if you go near them, and the pop-up barriers on the same level having sketchy collision detection (sometimes you go right through them and other times they knock you flying). The black marble after the catapult and the hammers before the goal are both missing on the fourth level too, and the fifth level doesn’t have the miniature enemies at the mid-level point or the flying birds in the run-up to the goal, which leads me to believe that the developers had to cut stuff out to finish the game on time…

On the plus side: unlike the Game Boy Color version this does have a two-player mode via a link cable, but I haven’t tried it because I don’t have a link cable. Whether this works or not, or what format it takes, I can’t confirm, but the box art and title screen do indicate that it supports link-up play.

That said: Marble Madness on the Game Boy – although playable, and also more lenient than the impossibly difficult Game Boy Color version – is too short and has too many omissions and inconsistencies from the original that it’s probably not worth bothering with.

More: Marble Madness on Wikipedia