Ball-bearing-in-a-maze madness!

Another one of those games that we would only ever glimpse across the classroom, on someone else’s desk. With a concept latterly reinvented as Marble Madness for your new-fangled microcomputers, Screwball Scramble was a genuinely addictive race-against-time affair from Tomy. Your job was to guide a ball bearing through a crazy maze via the use of a button, a lever and a knob¹. Could you get it from start to finish before the tick-ticking timer wound down one minute?

Destined to ratchet up your nerve-endings, Screwball Scramble’s life expectancy rapidly shortened as the game became regularly sighted sailing across the room following yet another maze traversing failure. Still in production today, we do have to wonder how many of those gobstopperish ball bearings actually ended up taking the rather more “screwy” route through some child’s rectal canal. Particularly on the last day of the school term. In Moss Side.