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First Person Shooters (Games) Businesses Apple

Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10 256

Posted by timothy from the explosive-candles dept.
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."
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Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10 More

Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10

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  • Thats nice and all... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:29PM (#11187236)
    But Church is still trapped there, and the blue team does not seem very concerned. o_O

    • RvB! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:43PM (#11187382)
      Red vs Blue rocks my socks!

      Check it out [redvsblue.com].
    • Wrong Answer. The correct first post should have been the above. Hosers...

      Why is it when I ask so many Halo "Fans" about Marathon, they look at me completely dumbfounded?

  • Marathon was awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:31PM (#11187260)
    Marathon was a great game. I think its gameplay AND story far surpasses halo. It's was really fun to replay the game when I was older, as reading all the information that's available on terminals and such makes the game SO much better.

    You can play it in a kind-of redoing of the engine if you have the original data files with Aleph One [bungie.org] is available (it's open source [sf.net], too!) Be sure to check out the official Bungie Marathon [bugie.org] site for more info.

  • Mac-games (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hermeshome.se ( 233303 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:33PM (#11187279) Homepage
    I often wounder if games on Mac would be at all if not for Marathon.
    I still remember my first glips of the Marathon demo and really thoght that, for the first time, there was hope for Mac. That was after I've played Doom till my fingers was numb. Marathon felt fresh. New. Like much on Mac does compared to other OS:es *choff*Windows*choff*.
    • It doesn't happen everyday that you stumble upon an universe as cool as the Marathon universe was. I remember playing multiplayer games with my brother for hours.

      How could I forget:

      "Frog blast the ventcore!!"
      "Hey! He's shooting at us!"
      The SPNKR.

    • Re:Mac-games (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NilObject ( 522433 )
      Remember, Halo and Oni were originally going to be Mac-only before Microsoft bought them out. Could you imagine if Bungie was still, well, good ol' Bungie? The Mac-gaming scene would sure be a lot better.

      You could imagine the shock and horror from the devoted Mac community when this happened. It was wose than Shaq quitting the Lakers for the Heat. Bungie had given us some of the best games ever, my personal favorite being Myth II. They were like family, really.

      Oh, the memories.

      • Re:Mac-games (Score:5, Informative)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @08:14PM (#11187651) Homepage Journal
        Remember, Halo and Oni were originally going to be Mac-only before Microsoft bought them out.

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

        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.

        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.

        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.

        • Re:Mac-games (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NilObject ( 522433 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @09:53PM (#11188257)

          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!

          • 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.

            I'm sorry if you took offense, as none was intended.

            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 al

    • Frog Blast the Vent Core! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @08:18PM (#11187694)
      I often wounder if games on Mac would be at all if not for Marathon. I still remember my first glips of the Marathon demo and really thoght that, for the first time, there was hope for Mac.

      Eh?

      • Brickles
      • Bolo (damn awesome tank game, still on InfoMac)
      • Canon Fodder (simple, but addictive- don't blow up the hospitals!)
      • Ottomatic(I think? Multilevel 2D ladders+levels, with a unicycle-robot)
      • RoboWar, a complex program-your-own-robot game which was very addictive
      • (forgot the name) line-art 3D shoot-the baddies-coming-down-the-tunnel game
      • (forgot the name) line-art 3D space-age-ish tank game that performed really, really well even on older machines. Collected flags, biased your tank(which was red) in terms of ammo/speed/armour, etc. Came in a really weird box.
      • NetTrek
      • Solarian II (STILL my favorite. Write Ben Hall and help me pester him into porting it to OS X, he's told me he wants to if only for fun, but never gets around to it. I think it does run under Classic)
      • Some sort of dungeon game, I think the premise was exploring a pyramid. You found scrolls, rings, and potions...objects could be cursed...my favorite was when you picked up a cursed object, a little high pitched voice would go "oh no!" :-)
      • Glider
      Given enough time, or a drive that could read 3.5" HFS floppies, I could think of/find even more.

      All fantastic, superb games, and I'd love to see source released on those which were not open, so that they can be updated for OS X. All caused me to waste far too much of my early high school years. All blew away their PC counterparts which were DOS and at best could go "bip" or "bop" and draw a square in one of 16 colors. Then the PowerPC came along, and Marathon knocked everyone's socks off. I damn near shit myself the first time I played Infinity when the aliens came out of the dark, and the space ship creaked and moaned...

      Oh, and Hypercard Kicked Ass compared to ANYTHING on the PC.

      Infomac seems to be missing a lot of the REALLY good, old stuff. Anyone know if there's a true historical archive of any of this stuff?

      • Re:Frog Blast the Vent Core! (Score:5, Informative)

        by asparagus ( 29121 ) <koonce@gm a i l . com> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @08:40PM (#11187882) Homepage Journal
        Solarian II [sticksoftware.com] is available for OS X now.

        The 3D game was spectre. BZflag [bzflag.org] sorta captures the gameplay but not the level design.

        Another classic of the time period, updated for OS X, is Oids [xavagus.com].
      • Speaking of Hypercard, the game DragonTrials was awesome. I couldn't find it after I had to get rid of my classic Mac lab (SE/30's), so I rewrote it as a .Net app. It's still ridiculously fun.
      • Myst, Spectre VR, OIDS, Vette, Falcon MC...
        There were lots of Mac-first games, but back in those days you needed a decked out monster of a Mac to play them. The crappy Mac Classics and Mac LCs in most schools generally didn't have enough horsepower to play much more than that 3D air hockey game.

        • A-10 Attack! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by eMartin ( 210973 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @10:47PM (#11188581)
          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.
          • Oh, and it didn't bother with the ugly low-res textures that other games at the time were using, and instead did everything (including camouflage) with polygons. This payed off more in the sequel, but both games looked really good.

            Oh yeah, and fog too! There were two levels that just looked great with the mountains in the background fading into the fog. I'm not talking about the visibility-killing fog used these days to improve performance either. This was there for the effect.
        • Spectre VR... oh the memories of blowing away my officemates. Woohoo!

      • I'm OT, but if you're going to compile a list like that, and leave off Chipwits, then either you missed out on one of the great Mac games of the 1980's or you need to turn in your Mac geek card.

        Chipwits was great! You construct a program for a little robot by laying out "chips" with different instructions (move forward, turn left, pick up item, scan ahead, ...) and wire them together with T/F gates. Then, you set the little bot loose in a maze for him to explore. Blindingly simple to do, extremely diff

        • Zork
        • Breakout
        • Super Breakout
        • Photshop
        (See: Mac Gamers [speckz.com])
    • Marathon wasn't the only classic Mac game (and I never really cared for it anyway). I remember playing and loving Spin Doctor and Power Pete as a kid, and there were probably a few others.
  • All this time, I was searching for a copy of the original so I could run it within BasiliskII. I figure that it's at least worth checking out because it the game that was always brought up when Mac gaming was discussed in the mid 90s.
  • ...anyone else here a vidmaster?


    I loved this stuff. I can still remember the first time I vid-ed the first level of Marathon 2...I played it more and before I played 1.

    • Re:Is... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ollie_ob ( 580756 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @08:03PM (#11187549) Journal
      I pledged to punch all switches, to never shoot where I could have used grenades, to admit the existence of no level except total carnage, to never use Caps Lock as my 'Run' key, and to never, ever, have left a single Bob alive.
    • ...WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A VIDMASTER?

      It is being balanced in the calm center of a whirling and untouchable tornado of destruction, while showers of grenades patter harmlessly around you and bullets crawl toward you in slow-mo.

      It is when your brain develops a new bundle of nerves whose only function is re-route impulses directly from your eyes to your finger muscles, so that you can twist and snap off a rocket long before you're conscious of the yellow blip in your motion detectors.

      It is when the differ

  • Story (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:47PM (#11187408) Homepage Journal
    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:Story (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 )
      > 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. ;)
    • Since we are hearing so much about this story, and considering that most of us won't ever have an opportunity to play the game for ourselves, would it be possible for someone to post a short synopsis?

    • Re:Story (Score:2)

      by Tet ( 2721 )
      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.

      Does anyone care? I mean really? Sure, gaming magazines write about the story all the time because that's the line that publishers have fed them. But gamers simply aren't interested. All they want to do is sit down and play the game. You only have to look at the success of Doom. It was just a high adreneline gore fest. Sure, there was a story tacked o

      • Re:Story (Score:3, Insightful)

        by schnell ( 163007 )

        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 e

      • Re:Story (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jeblucas ( 560748 ) <[jeblucas] [at] [gmail.com]> on Monday December 27, 2004 @12:18PM (#11191824) Homepage Journal
        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.

    • Yeah, the multiplayer was hella fun. In my first job (it was a dot com) we used to go down to the art floor after work and use the macs there to have huge battles. Good times.

      Then there was pathways to darkness... *sniff*

  • I remember... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mfifer ( 660491 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:51PM (#11187436)
    playing that EVERY night for 1 hour starting at 5 PM.

    I remember it had voice chat so you could taunt your buds.

    I remember watching LanDesk's network bandwidth utilization go off the hook while we played.

    And I remember a network tech with a sniffer one time asking "do you guys have a computer named Bitchslapper? It's using an awful lot of bandwidth!" :-)

    Man those were good times.

    Lemme end by trolling and saying, as a Mac user, Bungie are sellouts. But I''ll always have a soft place in my heart for the original Marathon...
    • A friend and my self used to bribe the Mac Lab tech, to let us play even though it was againist the rules.

      Want to know the bribe?? he had to play as well :-)

      Those were good times. I remember being yelled at by other students who would get upset when the tech wouldn't stop us. :-)

      We were playing marathon regularlly up until 2 years ago. Then we started switching to unreal.

  • Ah, Marathon. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by indig0 ( 812630 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @08:02PM (#11187542)
    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
    • I too remember the fun of Marthon and Bolo LAN parties. Late nights in 1995 with a bunch of Macs linked together with Ethernet and/or LocalTalk PhoneNet. Voicechat was awesome fun back then!

      My first Mac LAN party was actually in school around 1991 or 1992. We had a lab of Mac Classics (a modernized Mac Plus) that were netwoked mainly to share a couple laser printers. But the coolest use of the network??... OREGON TRAIL!!! The Mac version that we had supported LAN play. Each wagon could be made up of 1 - 5
      • I'm sure some of the first LAN parties ever were done on the Mac, actually (discounting minicomputer dungeon crawls like NetHack that is). While I don't think the Mac networking system was anything to take great pride in, it worked pretty well for what it was, and it was something that no other platform had at the time.

        And a lot of those old b&w Mac games were pretty incredible, networked or not. Spectre is still one of my favorite FPSes of all time, and I rather wish someone would reimplement it. Crys
      • Funny you should mention that... Marathon generated a decent but level amount of load during LAN games. While some were playing, others were watching network traffic and would use the excuse to test latency in new wiring. Therefore, all LAN gaming in our group of friends is referred to as Network Testing. ;-) This also makes it easier to discuss around the water cooler without getting anyone's attention. *grin* But you didn't hear that from me...
  • My old 6500/225 came with Marathon 2. I loved it so much, I printed the form from the "Bungie Catalog" and ordered the other two, along with the strategy guide (by IMG's own Tuncer Deniz) and the wall poster (that was before internet access became common here in Brazil).

    It took a loooong time to arrive, but when I opened the box, what a surprise. Rather than each game, they had sent me the Marathon Trilogy Box Set - the same games, a crapload of extras, and cheaper! The only thing they didn't send was the

  • Oni... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TrippTDF ( 513419 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {dnalih}> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @09:06PM (#11188006)
    Anyone remember Oni? Another great Bungie game that never got the honors it deserved... the game play was a lot of fun, and the story was pretty good.

    the thing that really got me was the load times- it took almost no time from clicking the icon to get to beating the crap out of guys.
    • My wife came by just as he pulled this move where Oni jumps up, wraps her legs around a guy's face and does a back flip. Complete with the noise of the guy's back breaking.

      My wife look at us and said "delete that".

      Oh, well...

    • Ugh. (Score:2)

      by solios ( 53048 )
      I have two highly unpleasant Oni memories- the first being the fact that the controls Can Not Be Remapped. That killed it for me... and the fact that it's STILL selling for 39.95 OR 49.95 (depending on which mac store you hit in the Pittsburgh area) is a joke. :|
      • Didn't look very hard, didja? The controls CAN be remapped by editing a textfile (keys.ini? somethin' like that) found in the same folder as the application. And when I bought it two or three years ago, I got it in the bargain bin for 10 bucks. Seems to me you're shopping in the wrong software outlets if they're still charging 40 bucks. :)

        triv

        • Yeah, but if he's looking for the mac version, he might have a harder time finding it in the bargin bin... I love macs, but there are so few games that come to eh platfor I think games keep their initial resale value longer.

  • Bragging rights (Score:3, Informative)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @09:17PM (#11188066) Homepage
    I am one of the Sevens

    http://marathon.bungie.org/story/_page2401/these ve ns.html

    Way back when, this page was built and if you read through all of it you'll be impressed with how detailed and immersive the plot and setting were for this game. This site cataloged ALL of that and made sense of it, and included a puzzle, the solution for which involved guessing a URL based on mathematical clues. I was the third person to find the solution to this puzzle, and... well, all you Xbox/Halo newbs are all just poseurs.

    Marathon rocks.
  • I've been looking for Marathon for about a month now for a old G3 iMac PC running OS9 and I can't find a full version *anywhere*.

    http://source.bungie.org/ [bungie.org] claims to have it, but the link I clicked "Download Marathon Aleph One" for OS9 resulted in a 1.9 megabyte file, a little small for a FPS even in 1994.

    This site [bungie.org] claims to have it but in the faq it says you need "a copy of Unreal Tournament" which is way too high-tech for a G3 Mac with 2meg video card.

    any other real sources where I can download a fu

  • This is a useful guide for running Marathon on Windows: http://www.calormen.com/mwd.htm [calormen.com]

    And with M1A1 you can play through the original Marathon on Windows (only Marathon 2 was ever released for Windows): http://orbitalarm.bungie.org/downloads/alephone.ht ml#M1A1_SE [bungie.org]

    I've been playing through M1A1, and it still holds up pretty well.

    • It should be pointed out that M1A1 does make some changes from the original Marathon. For one thing, Arrival starts with the end of Pathways Into Darkness, which tend to confuse people who aren't familiar with the original games.

  • SO much was done here that took years to follow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Foo2rama ( 755806 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @10:09PM (#11188374) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Sorry, I've tried to figure this out, but can't - if I download Aleph One, does it include the ORIGINAL Marathon? Everything I read talked about using Aleph One to play Marathon 2, or Marathon Infinity? I just want to get nostalgic, and play the original Marathon, because thats what I played in the dorms....(Oh geez)...10 years ago
    • All I get is alphaone starting, then complaining it lacks maps etc. How does this install in linux? It's making feel like an idiot. The only help I can find is in ages old versions, and the current one seems only to have any install info if you DL the source from sourcforge. Of course, it says to do a "./configure, make, make install" ... except there is no configure file. You have to run automake first (no mention of this anywhere), but unfortunately, it fails to generate a config file. Oh, and all y
      • When you unpack the maps tarball, there's a script file named "start". Look inside it to find out where it expects to find the maps etc.

        BTW, it's perfectly happy on a 233MHz PII (Mandrake 9.1) and looks 'way better than anything that old has any right to. This more than makes up for not being able to get Quake I running anywhere (which was going to be my holiday treat.)

  • Durandal, the rogue AI from Marathon, says... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @12:17AM (#11188984) Homepage Journal
    This makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I read it. I even plumbed through the depths of Marathon with a ResEdit to find this little gem. I've kept it in a text file ever since.

    • A man lit three candles on a certain day each year. Each candle held symbolic significance: one was for the time that had passed before he was alive; one was for the time of his life; and one was for time that passed after he had died. Each year the man would stare and watch the candles until they had burned out.


    • Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.

      At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.

      Bypassing my thought control cercutry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.

      The candles burn out for you; I am free.
      -Durandal


    I love that.

    LK
  • ... running about, getting chased by the Pfhor, and in general, sometimes getting lost. Bizarrely, I figured out one level in a dream, and awoke to finish it at 4 in the morning.
  • What sets Marathon apart is the balanced gameplay. The multiplayer games were not about "who knows where the rocket launcher is", because every weapon could be countered by another. Rockets were slow, flamethrowers had short range, the flechette was inaccurate, etc. We'd sometimes turn off time limits and play single games for hours on end starting at 12 or 1AM. I still have some "film" files for nostalgia. Oh, the memories.
  • There is a great Marathon total conversion for unreal tournament underway at http://resurrection.bungie.org/
    It is an attempt to meticulously recreate the original Marathon in a modern engine. They have been working on it for a while, but still have a few maps to complete. Right now you can play through the original demo, plus it has a lot of net play maps, including many form M:2 and M:i. House of pain, anyone?

  • Wikipedia article (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hachey ( 809077 ) on Monday December 27, 2004 @02:51AM (#11189636)
    Don't forget to check out that wikipedia article on Marathon [wikipedia.org]. Very informative (when I found it it lacked the BOB section, crime upon crimes!)
  • I went through a massive obsession with Marathon while the rest of the planet was stuck on Doom and the endless levels that followed. (I thought Doom was fun too, but it paled next to the attention to detail put into Marathon, especially the story.) Marathon was the first time I fell in love with an FPS and was also the first game that gave me a taste of network frag-fests. Amazing stuff. As the Marathon sequels came out and brilliance like Myth and Oni followed, I thought the guys at Bungie were set to joi
  • ...was the music.

    The music set the stage just as in a blockbuster movie. Not that the Marathon games were "all that," but what would "Star Wars" feel like without John Williams' scores?

    My favorite track: "Blaspheme Quarantine."

    The sad part about the music was that is was made using musical instrument simulations built into QuickTime version 2.5. When QT version 3 arrived, the music didn't play the same and things sounded very weird.

    The MIDI music was available online at one time, but it is hard to find

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