Marbles are fun. They’re spherical. They roll around. You can set up Rube Goldberg contraptions with them. They also inspire video games sometimes, like the arcade classic Marble Madness or the upcoming Switch game Marble It Up!

The path to Marble It Up begins with the legendary Marble Madness, as Executive Producer Mark Frohnmayer told us the continual line of thinking that influenced their marbley games is “What would Marble Madness play like today?”

“Marble Madness captured the connection between the control input and the movement of the marble, though with a very different trackball style of control and a fixed isometric camera,” he detailed. “It also had beautiful, very colorful graphics, compelling music, and sound effects that were a step above other games at the time. All of those goals are as relevant today as they were 30 years ago.”

Frohnmayer is a veteran of the games industry, working on Tribes and Tribes 2 in the late ‘90s and early 2000s before co-founding GarageGames. In addition to creating the Torque Game Engine, he also started his quest to make the perfect marble game with Marble Blast Gold and Marble Blast Ultra, though neither game ever made it to Nintendo platforms. I personally came across the very good Ultra on Xbox Live Arcade a number of years ago. Sadly, neither game is available now due to the rights issues.

However, Marble Blast Ultra came out in 2006 and shortly after, Frohnmayer left the company. He spent the next decade working on electric vehicles and Oregon election reform. It was the siren call of marble games and the Nintendo Switch that brought him back to games.

After seeing the early 2017 Switch reveal, Frohnmayer started to get the old team back together. In his eyes, the Switch was the “most awesome mobile gaming system the world had ever seen” and it was a perfect fit for the Marble Blast-style of game.

Ben Garney from the Engine Company was an early addition, especially since he worked with Frohnmayer in the past. Alex Swanson from Arcturus Interactive joined as a level designer, which made perfect sense since he made the levels in the old Marble Blast games. Todd Pickens from Shapes and Lines worked on art and visuals.

Then they almost ran into a snag when they went to the old MarbleBlast.com forums: another team was working on a new marble game. Luckily, instead of going head to head, they joined forces with mobile developer Alvios.

With the pieces in place, all they had to do now was make a game. The baseline was obvious from their experiences with Marble Blast, but the goal was to iterate and improve on the older games’ ideas. Marble Blast was purely gameplay driven, focused on controls and physics. In the 10+ years since Ultra’s release, many games tried to do what GarageGames did, but in Frohnmayer’s view “none really captured that really tight core feel.”

He elaborated more on their new game’s evolution: “What makes Marble It Up! distinct from Marble Blast is the level of cohesion and polish in the whole experience. The visual style is a giant cut above what we did before, the UI is crisp, the music is simply fantastic, and while we created a simpler control style overall (fewer buttons to push, fewer power ups), we also added things like continuous gravity surfaces, curves and rotating obstacles that opened up new types of gameplay that the Marble Blast series didn’t include.”

While Nintendo fans might see some Super Monkey Ball comparisons in Marble It Up, Frohnmayer sees the two styles differently. Monkey Ball is more of a 2D wooden labyrinth game where the player moves the level, not the ball. With Marble It Up and its inspirations, the player controls the ball. The dormant Sega series does have something in common with Marble It Up, though; they’re both focused on sensical physics and precise controls.

Marble It Up is set to launch on Switch on September 29. It’s a game that the developers feel is a great fit for the Switch, as it has the horsepower to run their engine smoothly and can be played in both short bursts on the go and long sessions at home docked.

New features will be rolled out (sorry not sorry) for Marble It Up after launch, including a mode Frohnmayer teased by just saying “Baller Royale anyone?” A multiplayer mode and some sort of a level editor are also on the way sometime after launch. But regardless of what’s going to be added to the game in the future, the team is thrilled to be making a new physics-based marble experience. They aim to make rolling a joy and if the footage they’ve shown so far is any indication, it indeed does look joyous.