Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10

Mjolnir Mark IV writes "Dec. 21 marked the 10th anniversary of the release of Bungie's classic Mac first-person shooter Marathon. Back then, the game was notable for besting its contemporary Doom in the areas of graphics, gameplay and story, all the while giving Mac gamers something to brag about. Today, the game's notable for its connections to the Halo franchise. When Bungie was bought by Microsoft they released the source code, and the game lives on in updated form."

Story

[BWJones]

Like the lined article says, Marathon was unique for its story. It went beyond the trick novelty of being a first person shooter and actually had pretty decent (for its time) story line. Not to mention the great networked game play that went on with wonderfully designed maps. Does anybody remember that little dark niche at the end of the hallway you had to walk towards to get up the staircase? Ha! You'd be walking down the hall and see a puff of flame and smoke only to find a SPNKR rocket headed right towards you. We had a great time in the genetics building late at night playing Marathon on Mac Quadra 840av's and when somebody got caught, you would hear a scream from somewhere in the building when they got killed (virtually of course).

Re:Uh... not quite

[theKinkyRabbit]

But gameplay, and story...sorry...were FAR from Doom.

Doom had a very thin, almost inexistant story. It was actually more of a pretext than an actual story. The gameplay made the game shines though, no question about that. And let's not forget the ambient fear of those dark corridors... *shivers*

Marathon, on the other hand, was much more graphically flashy (remember that alien texture set? Bright yellow, pink, green and blue everywhere) and much less nail-biting, but the fact that going from point A to point B had an actual purpose, usually delivered through the readings of some terminal, continually developping the storyline, had you much more involved than in Doom, where getting the blue/red/yellow key card was just, well... to let you get the hell outta here.

Ah, Marathon.

[indig0]

I don't really have anything interesting to say, but here's some random thoughts:

Marathon (Evil/Infinity) was my first LAN party, and got me hooked into hosting years and years of LAN parties. (Continued now with Aleph One.)

The smiley face at the end of the SPNKR rockets can now be seen on the front of the flak shells in the UT* games. An homage, I assume?

I'm glad this made /., as the Aleph One project could really use the traffic and attention. Those guys are great...

Not to restate what's already been said a few times, but Doom's story consisted of "kill stuff, find blue key, kill stuff, find red key, kill bigger stuff, next level". Marathon's back story is some great SciFi and still makes for entertaining reading. (Link in the article.)

Few things annoy me more than Halo/Xbox kiddies posting in forums without showing respect for Halo's roots in Marathon. Of course, that may be too much to expect from people who play an FPS with a joypad. ;-)

That's all I can think of right now, so:

FROGBLAST THE VENTCORE

Re:Uh... not quite

[Spock the Baptist]

Marathon had up/down movement whereas Doom did not. This is the first thing that you notice when switching from one to the other. Frankly it took Quake for Id to catch up with Bungie.

What makes me sad is that M$ got Bungie before Halo was finished for the Mac. Booo, hissss! Now I guess I'll have to wait for a couple of years for Halo 2 to make it to Mac OSX.

I refuse to buy an XBox, or any other game box. I'm not going to spend money on a bit of hardware that's only for games when I have a perfectly good G5 that can handle high end graphics very nicely.

My $0.02

Re:Marathon was awesome!

[HeghmoH]

I personally think that Halo is way better gameplay-wise. The AI makes it much more interesting to play, but Marathon was still kick-ass for its time. However, Halo's story really is weak and flat by comparison. Halo seems to throw in reversals and betrayals more out of boredom than anything else. Marathon's betrayals are all precisely timed to have the maximum impact when they kick you in the nuts. Its story still blows my mind today, and IMO it can stand next to the best SF books that I've read.

Re:Uh... not quite

[Trurl's Machine]

Doom had a very thin, almost inexistant story. It was actually more of a pretext than an actual story. The gameplay made the game shines though, no question about that. And let's not forget the ambient fear of those dark corridors... *shivers*

Well, that's precisely what the name of the company is supposed to mean - in Freudian terms, "id" is the uncouscious, unspoken, instinct-based. "Doom" has very little narrative story - but it has a very complex non-verbal story based on what you aptly descibed, the "ambient fear", the xenophobic loathing of the "other", the pure instinct of agression etc. I think Carmack & Romero were right on this one - FPP appeals better to your id than to your superego. If you want to read lenghty texts, play some cRPG...

Re:Story

[Xzzy]

> actually had pretty decent (for its time) story line.

For it's time?

Stories aren't game engines, they don't get experience huge advances as time goes on. In fact in most cases they get better with age. ;)

Maybe nobody on the PC side...

[interactive_civilian]

fozzmeister said:

I don't know abour Marathon, it may be superb. I never played it, but who remembers it now? everybody remembers Doom, and most have cleared it.

I think you would be very hard pressed to find a longtime Mac user who doesn't remember the Marathon trilogy.

Personally I always thought Marathon felt more polished than Doom simply because it had the ability to look up and down and you actually had to aim your weapons (without a crosshair) to hit things above and below you. In doom, you only had to point in their general direction (for example with the rocket launcher). Much better game-play IMHO.

Re:Mac-games

[NilObject]

No they weren't. You need a Bungie history lesson.

Turn off the flame-thrower, it's just a company, let's not get emotional about it.

Bungie's first PC game was Marathon 2. It mostly fell flat on the PC side, but that was their first foray into the Windows world.

You're correct on the first count, but completely wrong on the second. Here's what Bungie has to say about the "flop" of the PC version of Marathon 2:

Marathon 2, released in November 1995, was also the first Bungie game to be ported to PC (Windows 95, in September 1996), marking Bungie's transition from Mac specialist to multiplatform publisher. It coincided with tremendous growth - the company's revenues shot up an astonishing 500%. This was now a company with a marketing staff, programmers, artists, desks, Post-It notes - the whole deal!

Next up was Myth, which was a simultaneous Mac/PC release. Myth 2 followed the same tradition. Oni was simultaneous or nearly so for the Mac and PC, and also came out for the PS2. All of this was before the Microsoft Unpleasantness.

But Oni was intended to be a Mac-only game. It wasn't until 1999 (Oni dates back to the creation of the west-coast office in 1997), that it was announced to be a Mac/PC/PS2 title. It was also to be Bungie's first real console game (Marathon was ported to Pippin, but we all know what happend to that, uhh, wildly succesful platform...)

Halo was originally developed on Macs and intended for the same simultaneous Mac/PC release as all of their other stuff until Microsoft bought them out. Bungie hadn't been Mac-only for a long time at that point, and Microsoft's big change was making it an Xbox exclusive, and then finally allowing crappy ports to the PC and Mac worlds.

True. Even worse, it took forever for the crappy ports to come out. Bite me, Microsoft!

SO much was done here that took years to follow

[Foo2rama]

Marathon was a DOOM contempary, But it had dynamic lighting, and multiple network play modes such as. Kill the man with the ball, king of the hill, rocket arena, multiple team types all years before anything like it was out on the PC. Hopefully some day this game will get the respect it deserves in pre-dateing so many features found on later PC FPS's.

A-10 Attack!

[eMartin]

Don't forget A-10 Attack!

It was one of the first flight sim games that had things like [relatively] realistic physics, damage (tear off a wing by hitting a building or bend your landing gear by hitting the ground too hard), wind effects, passing day/night, lens flares for the sun, stars at night, airfield lights, plane shadows, visible weapons (bombs, rockets, etc.), multiplayer modes (maybe only in the sequel), particle-based smoke trails, a mission planner/editor, 3D cockpit with controls you could work with the mouse, and probably a few things I can't think of right now.

And that's not to mention, the coolest plane ever!

A-10 Attack never came out for the PC, but the sequel (A-10 Cuba) did.

It's still one of my favorite games.

Re:I'm starting to remember why I wasn't impressed

[artemis67]

Except that in Doom, you could only look left-right, not up-down. That also meant the shooting was always straight ahead in Doom, so no shooting at flying robots swooping down on you like in Marathon. And no jumping in Doom, IIRC, rocket or otherwise.

Marathon players INVENTED the grenade-hop that was popular for so long, and some advanced players still use.

Doom was strictly run-and-gun, no storyline. The Marathon world was immersive, with a great sci-fi storyline that was constantly unfolding. I also believe that Marathon was also the first FPS to have NPC's that fought beside you. Nothing like finding yourself surrounded by a small army of the toughest aliens the game has to throw at you, and then suddenly a platoon teleports in to save yer ass. All of this five years before Half-Life.

Even today, id is still cranking out whack-a-mole FPS games, while other companies like Bungie and Valve take the genre and make it immersive.

Re:Im more than a little of an id software fan

[wezelboy]

If Marathon had been released on PC instead of Mac 10 years ago, people would be saying "Doom? What's that?" Marathon was superior to Doom in every possible way. The only reason it is not as universally recognized is because it was released on a platform that few people had access to- let alone access to multiple machines on an ethernet network. Marathon isn't remembered by everyone, but those of us who were fortunate enough to play it on a LAN for hours on end until dawn remember it as one of the most important milestones in the history of computer gaming. Quake can make that claim as well, but only on the virtue of its engine. In more than one way even Quake was not as much fun as Marathon. It sure looked better though! Nuff said... Gotta frag.

Re:Frogblast the Vent Core!

[Surlyboi]

He has a point though. You should know the history of Marathon, not to be snobbish about your gamer cred, but because you'll garner so much more enjoyment from Halo if you do. Even the RvB example from the first post is funnier if you know you're looking at Marathon in that last frame.

'sides, everybody should know about the Big Floaty Thing What Kicks Our Asses. =)

Re:Lots of forgotten DOOMalikes...but on on the PC

[Moofie]

DOOM inspired? What are you talking about?

Marathon and DOOM were contemporaneous. Marathon came out of Pathways into Darkness, which was contemporaneous (roughly) with Wolf3D.

How could you have played Marathon for any amount of time, and called it "derivative" of anything? Did you totally fail to pay attention to every terminal in the game?

Re:Mac-games

[Lord Kano]

Halo would have had a CS like following on the PC had MS not alienated so many potential customers by keeping it XBox only for so long.

I remember all of the excitement at the MacWorld Expos when Steve Jobs demoed what Bungie had produced up to that point.

Had Bungie been left to its own devices and been allowed to develop the game as they saw fit, it would have been a raging success on the PC and Mac.

It ended up being the FPS that FPS haters would play.

LK

Re:I remember...

[Lord Kano]

I don't really blame Bungie, they got bought out. When someone buys a controlling stake in your company, they get to call the shots. Even if they're making idiotic decisions.

I prefer to say Fuck Microsoft for ruining Bungie.

LK

Re:Frogblast the Vent Core!

[chainsaw1]

The first time I played Halo and heard the little monsters screaming "They're everywhere" I about died in laughter. As I couldn't help it, I made a fwoosh sound and a scream with my mouth, and turned to see a bunch of people staring at me.

Those of us who played the gamma/beta of Marathon knew of the Random Man "officialy the BoB's" who would run around screeming "They're Everywhere" until killed. Many a deathmatch was interrupted by this Random Man running across your sights. Hunting them down with a flamethrower proved to be fun, as for some reason they always seems to say they're scripted line right before screeming in pain as their burning bodies collapsed into a burnt pile on the ground.

This memory always comes flashing back as the Halo Grunts run in fear screaming that immortal line.

Re:Story

[schnell]

Does anyone care? I mean really? ... It was the gameplay that counted, not the story.

I think that lots of people care, actually (myself included). It all depends on your preference and what you're in the mood for, but story is extremely important to me - even for FPS, it's what makes the difference between a game I pick up for a few minutes of twitch-n-blast (like Quake3) and one that I play all the way through (like Marathon, Halo or Half-Life). I think it goes without saying that story is also a key element of non-FPS games as well ... I wouldn't have finished any of the Final Fantasy games or KOTOR if they didn't have engrossing stories (I didn't bother finishing Metal Gear Solid 2 precisely because it had one of those "what drugs do the Japanese take?" stories that eventually made me stop caring about the game).

It may just be that I'm getting older (yeesh ... an ancient 31 now), but the quality of the story is what determines whether I play a game all the way through or put it down after a couple hours. And since that playability basically equates to whether I got my money's worth from the game (hours played vs. money spent), I almost exclusively buy games that I have heard have good stories attached to them. Am I the only one doing this?

Re:Story

[jeblucas]

The story does matter--even if you don't think it does. Especially on quasi-immersive games like FPS. Is anyone still playing Serous Sam? That's the best frigging gameplay ever for an FPS--but now it's remembered for big open spaces and that headless screaming guy--no one's playing it. Marathon has a huge cult following. Have you seen the websites/blogs teasing out Marathon from Halo?Here. [bungie.org] Here. [bungie.org] Here. [gamegirladvance.com]

...Nevermind the whole bungie.org [bungie.org] phenomenon.

But you are correct when you say the gameplay's important. Marathon was revelatory. I remember the first time I rocket-jumped (by accident--had a shield and survived the blast at my toes--then I realized I could get places!) It had a "third" dimension that made Doom pale in comparison. But, hey, even the guys writing Doom wanted there to be -some- story, hence the whole Hell on Mars thing. Marathon took that to another level--it wasn't a paragraph on the screen--it was a whole back story that we still don't know all of--ironically given out in bits and pieces by in-game paragraphs-on-screens. I remember the first time I saw a Compiler, just interfacing with the terminal--too distracted to notice me. That was disturbing--it gave the bad guys a life outside of KILL TEH URTHMAN!!11

I downloaded Aleph One and the new Eternity module last night. I'm looking forward to heading back in.

Re:Mac-games

[HeghmoH]

All accounts of Myth 2 say they shipped together, but the Mac version was available first because a Virus was found in the PC Gold Master and the PC version recalled. In most Cases stores pulled all versions from the shelf Mac and PC. After that you would find it as a Hybrid Box sporting an orange sticker claiming to be Version 1.1 (and for all intents and purposes the same game, just Virus Free)

Do you have any cites for this? I recall both Myths being hybrid discs, but I could be wrong.

When Bungie announced they were selling to MS, both Oni and Halo were in production. In fact, so was Myth 3.

It turns out you're right about Oni. Do you have any cites about Myth 3? As far as I remember, it got started as a "milk the franchise for every last penny" project by the company that bought the series.

Halo was supposed to be released on Mac and PC from the start, but it was going to be on the Mac FIRST. I was at the MacWorld Keynote speech where Halo was first introduced (the same one we first saw the clamshell iBook). I believe it was Jason Jones on stage with Steve Jobs who narrated the trailer they were playing before the crowd as he explained what we were watching was played on a G4 with a ( then unavailable for the Mac) nVidia video card running hacked drivers.

He emphasized that the game would be for the Mac First with later release for the PC. The audience had been in quiet awe during the presentation when this caused the crowd to erupt into cheers.

I just downloaded and watched the keynote video. There's no mention that Halo will be Mac first, just that it will be on the Mac. After the realtime demo, Jason Jones just says that Halo is a work in progress and will be out in the first half of the next year.

If you're interested, the (very low-quality) keynote video can be had here [carnet.hr]. If I missed something there, please do tell. (It's worth downloading just for the first few minutes with Steve Jobs and Noah Wiley.)

And please, mods - If You Don't know if someone is right, don't mod them up Just because it sounds right !!

Good luck with that. 99% of slashdot moderators couldn't find their ass with two hands and a mirror. (Yes, I mean you, Mr. Mod.)