Marble Madness is a game that has been on my mind a lot over the years, considering I have never actually played it.

Though it was first released in 1984 and was ported to the Apple IIe (my first computer) two years later, I first saw the game when it came to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1989. I've been wanting to play it ever since. A just-released free remake called Rolling Madness might allow me to do just that... if I ever get it working.

I think what attracted me most to the game was its ability to convey a rich, three dimensional world with relatively simple graphics. As a kid, one of my favourite TV shows was Secret City, in which Commander Mark led a cast of spacefaring adventurers who, inexplicably, spent all their time drawing. Each episode would introduce some new 3D drawing technique (cross-hatching was my favourite), and would end with Commander Mark adding some element to a large mural of a futuristic city. The mural would develop week-to-week, with each addition making use of the technique introduced in that episode. I'd love to see the finished product, if indeed it was ever finished.

Inspired by Secret City, I spent many classroom hours doodling heavily cross-hatched, futuristic suburbs in my excercise books. And when Marble Madness came along, it seemed as if those worlds had come to life.

Thanks to some serious snow shovelling (and a healthy dose of begging), I became the proud owner of a NES, but there was always some deeper, more exciting game around when I had money in my pocket to buy one. The Dragon Warrior series of games, in particular, kept me too short of time and money to finally get a dose of Marble Madness.

One day, it seemed as if my prayers had been answered. An ad in some game magazine offered a treasure trove of used "NES classics", seemingly for a pittance. I photocopied the page, checked off the necessary boxes, and sent off the modest sum that would bring Marble Madness flying to my doorstep. And fly it did--along with customs fees galore. The day we had to send the courier away with the game because of the outrageous import charges was a sad one.

Years later, games featuring simplistic, isometric 3D worlds still hold an illogical attraction for me, and many such games have come and gone. Solstice (detailed review) ended up taking over as the object of my obsession on NES. On the Super Nintendo (SNES), Actraiser's thin 3D simulation mode was worth playing through the frustrating action sections. On the PC, SimCity 2000 and other, similar games kept me playing in large part because of their isometric world views.

Though I don't have much time for games these days, Rolling Madness would have deserved at least a few hours of my time... except that it won't run on my computer. Despite up-to-date drivers and a fairly capable ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, launching the game presents me with a fatal error message:

***ERROR: This program requires OpenGL version 1.21 or better. You have version 1.1. Please update the video card drivers.

Looks like if I want to play Marble Madness, the ame that started it all, I may have to bite the bullet and download an NES emulator.