Marble Madness II was originally going to be called "Marble Man: Marble Madness II". However, after the game failed during location tests, Atari decided to remove the anthropomorphic marble character and shift the controls from trackballs to joysticks. It still failed location tests, which was attributed to the overwhelming popularity of Street Fighter II, and the game would not see any releases.

While a few prototypes floated and footage of both iterations existed, it wasn't until May 2022 that a prototype of the later version was leaked.