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Super Monkey Ball has three game modes: main game, party games, and mini-games. The mini-games are unavailable at first, and must be unlocked by earning 2,500 "play points" through playing the main game in single-player mode.

Reminiscent of Marble Madness and Labyrinth, the objective of the main game is to guide one of four playable monkeys (AiAi, MeeMee, Baby, and GonGon) encased in a transparent ball across a suspended series of platforms and through a goal. By moving the analog stick, the player tilts the entire set of platforms that make up a level, called a floor, and the ball rolls accordingly. If the ball falls off a floor (an event dubbed a fall out) or the in-game timer reaches zero, the player loses one of their three lives. The speed, in miles per hour, at which the ball is moving is displayed in the corner of the screen.

Super Monkey Ball was developed by Amusement Vision, a branch of the Japanese video game publisher Sega that was created in 2000 and composed of about fifty people. Amusement Vision president Toshihiro Nagoshi, who had previously worked under Sega AM2's Yu Suzuki and been credited as the creator of the arcade titles Daytona USA and Virtua Striker, devised the concept of rolling spheres through mazes based on his desire to create a game that was instantly possible to understand and play, as a contrast to increasingly complex games at Japanese arcades at the time. Prototypes involving a plain ball or a ball with an illustration were considered visually unappealing due to difficulties in perceiving its movement, so after a series of revisions monkey characters previously created by an Amusement Vision designer named Mika Kojima were placed inside the ball, with their appearance being altered to include their "distinctive" ears. Intended to feature a "cute" aesthetic and accurate physics engine, the game debuted at the 2001 Amusement Operator Union trade show as Monkey Ball, a single-player arcade cabinet controlled with a distinctive banana-shaped analog stick.

In early 2001, Sega announced that it was discontinuing its Dreamcast home console and restructuring itself into a "platform-agnostic" third-party publisher. As a result, an enhanced version of Monkey Ball dubbed Super Monkey Ball was released for the GameCube as a launch game in Japan on September 14, 2001 and North America on November 18. The GameCube version was demonstrated to the public at E3 in May and at Nintendo's Space World show in August; Sega confirmed that it would arrive in time for the GameCube's launch at the June 2001 World Hobby Fair. As the first game Sega published for a Nintendo home console, Super Monkey Ball was considered a milestone for the company.

Super Monkey Ball was commercially successful upon release and remained one of Sega's best-selling titles in the United States through much of 2002. The game's North American sales were strong in 2001, in addition to a further 105,000 units sold through August 2002. At the GameCube's United Kingdom launch, Super Monkey Ball was among the four best-selling games for the system, with those titles occupying positions two through five on the all-formats chart.

While it sold well in all major territories, Nagoshi was disappointed by the game's performance in Japan, where he had expected it would be most successful; weak GameCube launch sales were cited as negatively impacting its performance in the country. The game sold 72,631 units in Japan.

The success of the game spawned a franchise, with 16 sequels or spin-offs released to date. Due to its complex physics engine and abundance of possible shortcuts, Super Monkey Ball has been popular with professional speedrunners. A 2006 study conducted by the Beth Israel Medical Center found that surgeons who played the game for 20 minutes prior to performing a surgical drill finished slightly faster and made fewer mistakes. Super Monkey Ball inspired Neverball, a free and open source game for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Dreamcast, and iOS. The 2020 battle royale game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been described as "Super Monkey Ball for the Fortnite generation" by Tom Wiggins of Stuff magazine.

In 2006, Nintendo Power ranked it the 38th best game available on Nintendo platforms, commenting "who knew that such cute characters with cinnamon roll ears could be the source of so much tension (when the clock is ticking) and so much relief (when they finally break the ribbon)?" In February 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine placed the game 90th on a list of the best Nintendo games, noting that "Along with the bum-clenchingly tricky puzzle stages, you get some great mini-games in this brilliant arcade game." In March 2009, Edge ranked the game #39 on its list of "The 100 Best Games To Play Today", stating "Seeing its sturdy physics model being used to perform incredible acrobatic feats shows just how finely honed it is." Writing in 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, Christian Donlan described Super Monkey Ball as "one of Sega's grade-A triumphs."