> Not showing up was maybe a Covid thing. I am not sure if safestuff actually released > it anon or if someone got it from Aaron and leaked it.
There’s almost no chance it came directly from Scott Evans or Aaron Giles. There were at least four Marble Madness II machines made for development and location tests, but likely no more than twelve. We know at least thee people besides Scott Evans have the ROMs, if not complete machines:
Bob Flanagan, who developed the game, kept at least a set of ROMs. Scott Evans got the ROM data from Bob Flanagan in order to repair the Marble Madness II board he got with no ROMs.
The anonymous collector who Scott Evans originally begged to for ROMs, and eventually got to lend him an unprotected GAL to copy.
Scott Swazey evidently has the ROMs, as he’s working making bootleg reproductions by converting some other Atari arcade game. He’s posted progress reports in various places, as well as the demonstration in that John’s Arcade video.
Copies of the game are evidently in the hands of multiple people. Any of those people could have leaked it, probably when one of the hoarders pissed them off. After all, it turned out Akka Arrh was “leaked” by someone Scott Evans hand brought in to help him dump the game who he subsequently pissed off. Scott Evans concocted the whole story about it being surreptitiously dumped by a technician hired to service another game as a diversion.