Arcade games in the 80’s were weird. Let’s take Marble Madness for example. Your character is a marble and it’s your job to guide it through a series of ‘races’ within a time limit. Extra time you have on the clock carries over to the next race, so it’s in your best interest to get to the finish line as quickly as possible.
Beyond the normal hazards that one would expect to find in a racecourse in that exists in a nondescript space (like hills, precipices with no walls, and hovering platforms) you also have to contend with bizarro enemies like marble-dissolving acid puddles, marble-eating green tube monsters, and aggressive black enemy marbles.
Oh, sure, the game seems short, with its six stages and simplistic goal, you might expect to breeze through this game in a matter of minutes, but you would be mistaken. Sorely. The difficulty level in this game blows way past brutal and borders on sadistic. I would presume that the massive difficulty is to compensate for the shortish game. It’s so hard that it just seems crazy-long.