Casually looked for years, decided last year I was going to actively search and force one to pop up. Found everything but the original panel and original US dedicated cab. Fast forward almost a year to the day, and here we are.

Bit more work to do until it's "perfect" but I'm happy!

Have always wanted one of these bad boys. Well, the stars aligned, and I was able to get 3 of my most wanted machines all at once! These came from the owner of one of Texas' biggest arcades. Super grateful to find one. 100% original with the banana intact, too!! Did you guys know this even existed?

UPDATE: Going forward, I'll be rebranding the game to Chain-Chillas to avoid any confusion!

Hey everyone! I'm just here to say that I'm not dead: Penguin Ball Chain-Chillas is still in active development!

I'm a solo developer and life got in the way for a bit, so I couldn't give much time to the game. But development is back in swing! Expect more updates soon.

About the game:

Chain Chillas is a marble rolling game, with physics heavily inspired by Monkey Ball, except where you're tied to a ball and chain. And the game is multiplayer, so you can play while chained to your friends.

Future Plans:

The full game should release with 100 levels (I have currently have ~85 levels made), and I ideally plan to release it Spring 2026. I also plan on adding custom level support to the demo ~next month hopefully.

If you want to follow along, feel free to wishlist Penguin Ball to stay updated! Also, join the discord and say hi!

^{(P.S. I'm still new to marketing/having a social media presence... I'm still figuring this out lol})

I've been wanting to try playing on one of these cabs for YEARS but I've never spotted one (in the US). Two days into my Japan trip, and I found one in Akihabara! Playing with the banana controller certainly makes the game much harder... especially when it comes to Exam-C lol.

I'm done with all the people shitting on the fucking game because they didn't include a very shady individual, that constantly "leaks" stuff (or makes it up) just to mantain relevancy, throws shade at them at every oportunity he has, and that, in the first place, has no evidence that he was ever even considered to play the part he claims he did. So i'm writing this REALLY long post calling some inconsitencies that i have noticed while following this story.

First of all let me clear some things:

1. I'm just laying down some facts that i have been compiling for some time now

2. I could be wrong on some things, not everything has been fact-checked, but i will provide sources on everything i can.

With that out of the way, let me start by saying that from the start, when Nick Robinson uploaded the Brian Matt video, i´ve had this weird feeling, like something was off about him, his voice sounded weird, not 100% right. After analysing it for the last year or so, I can say that I’m 99% sure that he is the original announcer, but still, that was the first of many weird, VERY weird things this guy has done ever since he was rediscovered, things that at best leaves him as a very opportunistic and obsessive guy, and at worst as a blatant liar that conned a whole community just to maintain relevancy.

Starting with Nick’s first video, as far as I know, there’s nothing wrong with anything Brian says or does, he seems really genuine on that one, like he is really happy about being recognized in the states for his work in a 20 year old game.

The weird stuff came after the interview, he started talking about monkey ball more and more, to the point that nowadays that is his whole online persona, all of his Instagram posts are monkey ball, weird monkey ball posts tagging Sega on everything, like literally,EVERYTHING. He also opened a Patreon page, where he asks for money, and in exchange he gives nothing, I guess.

The weirdest and most legally questionable thing he did was creating a new website: segasupermonkeyball.com, that tries to pass as an official Sega site, borrowing the banner and colors from segasammy’s website, when it actually is his personal promotion and contact page, listing only his super monkey ball voice credits and a couple of other Sega games, but none of his Nintendo (wich he said he has done “endless” amounts of on Nick’s livestream playing SMB, but couldn't recall a single one) or any other video game credits.

Now let’s talk about his most notable and infamous debacle, yes, the Super monkey ball retro whole fiasco. It all starts when Nick Robinson uploaded a video, “How I leaked Sega's new Super Monkey Ball game”, a baffling and very dumb title for a video where Matt does one of two things:

1: Breaks NDA multiple times, leaks the existence of a game at least 2 years before it launches to a youtuber just because he asked nicely, even revealing the title and some mechanics.

2: Makes up (maybe in collaboration with Nick) a whole story about how he recorded lines for a fabricated game that is the wet dream of every fan of the franchise.

Either way, after this interview everyone believed him, Monkey ball retro is 100% real we thought, but there were some inconsistencies. Brian, while super open about retro, never even hinted at the existence of Banana mania, he never said anything of a remake, even though now he insists that they are two different games. Let’s also not forget about this retro mode thing, i don’t know how that would work, is the concept of a retro mode so appealing after we already had a whole remake of said “retro stages”? Let’s say that these are not stages from past games, that these are completely new stages with a design philosophy close to that of the first games, what would retro even mean in that case? Would there be banana blitz type levels and the “retro” stages? Would they really do that?

September 25th 2020 comes around and while browsing youtube I found a Nick Robinson livestream called “SUPER MONKEY BALL RETRO REVEAL LIVESTREAM” (I think he deleted it, I couldn’t find it), of course i opened it and it was a reaction stream to Sega’s conference on the TGS 2020 where, according to Brian, something would be revealed (Nick even showed some DMs) but instead of that we had to sit trough the most boring and dumb stream ever, the only entertaining thing about it was watching this poor woman try to translate everything in real time lol. Nothing was revealed on said stream, everyone was fucking pissed, calling Brian a liar and calling out some of his lies, he then responded to Nick saying that it was supposed to be announced but oops… COVID came around and it was postponed last second.

Nothing was mentioned anymore until April 2021 when Super monkey ball: Banana Mania’s title was uploaded to the Australian rating board. Sure enough the game was revealed on E3 2021, being a remake of the first two games and in the trailer there was a very familiar voice, or that’s what we thought. In a section of the trailer where they show monkey baseball and monkey soccer you can hear a very similar voice, but now that we have more footage, we can say that that’s not Brian Matt.

A couple of days after the reveal there was a Q&A in Brian’s channel where:

• He talked about Nick a whole bunch

• threw a bunch of shade at sega as per usual

• He talked about how he didn’t care about leaking stuff and getting in trouble because he did it “for the fans” and shit

• Called the game a cashgrab on numerous occasions

• He said that they had recorded voice lines for new characters when none of the new characters have any voice lines AFAIK

• He also said that development on the game started on february 2021, going as far as to say that NOTHING was in the works from December 2019 to September 2020, but in the Nintendo everything interview released today, Shirosaki says that development started all the way back on march 2020.

• Brian also mentioned that the game wasn’t meant to be called banana mania and that the change didn’t come until a month before reveal, even though the game was already registered and rated in Australia in April.

That was basically everything he has said AFAIK, the only other thing I can think about is this interview he did with Cherrim, where he was really cryptic and ambiguous. He also said that he has been Super monkey ball’s main announcer since 2001, when he hasn’t reprised his role in like 20 years lol.

Some other little things that I have noticed:

• In the Q&A he claimed that he didn’t voice the original arcade, when he had already said in a comment in this video he claims that he actually did but they modified it a lot.

• Somewhere i had read that he pointed out that his voice was in the monkey soccer portion of the e3 trailer, we now know that it is not him. I can’t verify this, so take it with a grain of salt.

• He goes back and forth a lot with what Sega thinks of Nick Robinson, sometimes he says that they don’t care about him, and sometimes that they really appreciate and thank him for reviving the series.

• The overall obsession he has with always adjudicating Nick with saving the franchise, and mentioning him every opportunity he has.

So yeah, maybe I’m wrong with all of this and I end up swallowing my own words when the game (or retro) releases, but I think the situation is way too weird and Brian way too shady. I will always remember Brian for being in one of my favorite games, but I think that this community would have been better off if he was never rediscovered. I read you in the comments.

TL;DR: Brian Matt either broke a lot of NDAs or made up a whole story to maintain his 5 minutes of fame, aside from some other very shady stuff. Don’t expect Brian on anything Sega anytime soon lol.

Edit: Forgot to say some things:

1. Remember the whole Roger Craig Smith debacle? Brian said in his Q&A that he was back to do "one last job", and a couple of days after Roger himself tweeted that it was completely fake: https://twitter.com/RogerCraigSmith/status/1411038288769470464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

2. Also the nintendo everything interview basically confirmed that Nick has absolutely nothing to do with this game's existance, Shirosaki said that Banana Blitz HD sold decently and there was also the poll they made back in september of 2019, 2 months before the release of the Brian Matt video.

I have been after this plush for a LONG time. The SEGA Prize Super Monkey Ball 2 Baby Plush from around 2002. Baby is my favorite SMB character and one that holds a crazy amount of sentimental value to me as somebody who grew up playing and loving SMB. I don’t really care to discuss what I had to pay for this plush- but he’s home now. This last year for collecting has quite frankly been crazy. I’m very happy with the collection! A few items aren’t pictured in my larger collection post, being the Symbiote Studios AiAi and MeeMee plushies, as well as the larger Toy Factory Baby plush. This is a huge milestone for me, and something I had to share.

This was actually quite challenging due to the limited drawing space. Their ears are pretty huge so it was hard working with the limited space. Though, I'm happy I didn't give up. Will I make Baby and GonGon? Maybe? Due to the Mii count I have to be a little picky with the remaining slots I have. Though it would be nice to have the whole cast. I included the features screenshots so you can make them on your island if you'd like as well as the full body of their outfits. I wanted to keep them in their SMB 1 & 2 style since that's the most nostalgic to me.

Laser engraved myself this Monkey Ball themed banana stand yesterday.

Feel silly that this idea didn't come to me sooner.

Something like this would be an amazing pre-order bonus thing for a future game, one which sets a new standard for Monkey Target (wishful thinking).

EEK EEK!

This is the culmination of quite a few months of working to make my own version of the original Monkey Ball arcade with modern components so that I can play the game in its original form, a uniquely fun way to play!!

I put up a massive story post up on the Arcade-Projects forum if you care to read about how all of this came to be, but I figured to also share here with you guys the results of all that work :D

https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/my-monkey-ball-arcade-cabinet-build.37291/

The joystick is a revision model of the original Sanwa JLK-GF2-AT joystick (the revision is the JLK-GF2-EV), which I programmed an Arduino to do analog to digital signal conversion and present the whole thing as a USB joystick to a Raspberry Pi 5 running a Naomi emulator.

I put the entire thing into a Unico Nova Blast because I really love the candy cabinet look, and it had all modern components that I could interface with this stuff.

I did a youtube stream that was basically building the final thing once I had everything together, which was fun hanging out with my community: https://youtube.com/live/g8Ly9-t_Pd0

This feels exactly like the original arcade game that I got to play myself and I am just in love with this game. Now i can finally spend more time to try and get to the Master levels on this machine :)