When I was a sophomore in highschool, I had a complete and total nervous breakdown.

Around the December holidays, I came home from school one afternoon and flat out told my parents I wouldn't be returning to school after vacation. I didn't return to school for months, as a result. At the time I was in heavy therapy, on heavy medication and failing every class. I was not doing well, to put it lightly. During this time, I spent all my time at home - once my folks officially pulled me out of school and began to look for other options - simply using my laptop in my bedroom all day long. Between hearing a voice telling me to hurt myself and a diet made up entirely of diet coke and salsa, which only exacerbated my anorexia, I became a total hermit. My stepfather was a major Mac user, so we all had Mac hardware, and with them, the games that came preinstalled, one such being Marble Blast Gold.

Marble Blast Gold, for the uninitiated, is a title developed by Garage Games and published by Monster Studios, both super generic names for companies I, likely understandably, have never heard from since. As of today, it's actually free to download, which is pretty neat, and it had a sequel, Marble Blast Ultra, back on the 360 arcade. It's pretty basic. You play as a little marble, trying to clear obstacles courses and collect gems. That really is about it. Sure you can set your own records, beat those records, even go after other peoples records, but it's nothing if not shallow, and yet...

...it was the only thing I did for months at a time. I became so good at it that I not only 100% the base game and had to download mods, but I lost all interest in any other games I might've been playing at the time. Obviously I'm a sucker for platformers, but even moreso I'm a sucker for unique platformers, and Marble Blast Ultra was definitely unique. Not unlike Marble Madness which came before it, it follows a very basic formula, but one that's incredibly addicting and, if I may say so, was if anything the precursor to mobile games, in terms of how they functioned and how they kept you interested. Sure, you could easily sit down and play a few levels at a time, but you could also easily sit down only meaning to play a few levels at a time, look up, and realize it's 8 hours later. I was the latter.

But it's no real surprise, even beyond my gaming hobby and genre adoration, that I wound up having this title as a special interest. It's colorful, it's bright, it's very simple, and that appealed to me. During this time, one afternoon, my parents had a meeting with a few other higher ups in the school system, trying to figure out what exactly to do with me. They made me sit outside the mobile building and entertain myself while they decided my future, and since I could bring my laptop, I did, and I played this the entire time. Not that that kept me from hearing the things they said about me. Terminology that would follow me throughout my life, come to define me, not just by my standards but by societal standards to boot.

Things like "special education" and "developmentally disabled". Talks about individual home tutoring (a thing that did happen for a while) and potentially even staying in high school longer than the 4 required years (which I was certainly not going to do) in order to graduate properly.

I was unable to fight for my own autonomy, it seemed liked, simply because my brain doesn't work too well. I don't come across as challenged, because I can read and write on a college level, but that's about as far as my skills come, and every other skill atrophies at a elementary school level or lower. I know nothing about history beyond basic everyday facts that we all know, science makes no sense to me even if it seems cool, and math...well let's not even get into that. So for a lot of adults, especially those in the education system (oddly enough) they just couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that I was challenged simply because they'd seen how well I could read and write. But even that was something I got lucky with, as I had a special tutor early on who somehow helped me conquer it.

Much like a marble on an obstacle course, everything was doing whatever it could in its power to knock me off balance, send me tumbling to the depths below, but I kept moving. Much like a marble on an obstacle course, I had but one goal...reach the end, no matter what the end may actually be. Graduation? Controlled living environment? Death itself? Who knows, but dammit I was gonna get there. And while they did put me into a special continuation school, which I also flunked at, and while I did manage to eventually graduate high school, though no diploma was ever given to me and I secretly believe they merely shuffled me out because they realized they couldn't help me and instead needed the room I took up for other students, I never stopped moving. To this day, much like a marble on an obstacle course, I continue to move forward, whether I want to or not, because it's the only choice I really have.

I played the sequel to Marble Blast Gold, titled Marble Blast Ultra, and it was one of the first arcade titles I ever played on the Xbox 360. Also likely one of the first games I ever 100%. It's extremely similar, but perhaps just not as memorable. But the end goal is the same. Avoid obstacles, collect gems and reach the end of the course, often within a time limit. Life itself has a time limit too, you just rarely think about it until the time is up.

I haven't played Marble Blast Gold or Ultra in years, but I feel like I don't really need to revisit them. Perhaps I'll eventually load them up on my PC just to see if my skills have atrophied, but it won't really be the same. They existed for me at a very specific time during a very specific time I needed them to, for a very specific reason. They served their purpose, and I will forever be grateful. Now I've learned to avoid obstacles on my own, with or without powerups, because really, it's the only option I've got.

Some people had family, some people had friends, some people had romantic partners. I had a marble.

That's just how I roll.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.