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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."
But Church is still trapped there, and the blue team does not seem very concerned. o_O
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 is available (it's open source, too!) Be sure to check out the official Bungie Marathon site for more info.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I liked this game when I was younger, and I just got the action sack that has all three of them. Great series. I like them more then the Halo games Bungie's doing now. But that's just me.
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*.
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.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
This depends on your tastes.
I got sick of Doom pretty quickly, but I still play Marathon today on my old Mac.
...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.
Gah! I never thought I'd live to see the day when "Microsoft" and "released the source code" are used in the same sentence (current statement excluded).
Red vs Blue rocks my socks!
Check it out.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
You mean far ahead from Doom, right?
Seriously I can't remember Doom having a story at all when compared to the several thousand Marathon terminals you had to read to finish the game.
diegoT
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).
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
Life isn't a bitch. Life is a virgin. A bitch is easy.
You're an idiot.
Doom's Story: There's some human colony on Mars. Or something. There *are humans*, we do know that...
Oh yeah, and hell opened up or something inside the base. It doesn't really *tell* you before you play, or even while you're playing. You're just shooting stuff the whole time.
Also, Marathon and Doom play in a very similar way, with the 2.5D graphics and sprite-animation. In doom, both you and monsters move faster than in Marathon, though.
Marathon has a much deeper story than Doom. Marathon has pages and pages of terminal instructions from the AIs, and your missions vary from rescue to sabotage to fixing radio transmitters. You even watch as one AI goes insane and commands you!
In Doom, there are no plot changes or even really a plot at all. You just blast aliens that come out of some portal or whatever.
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...
is Hired Guns, a real 3D multiplayer Amiga game that came around a year or so before Doom. It was more 3D than Doom because entities could be stacked on top of others (Doom was more like 2.5D). It wasn't smooth-scrolling though, you could only move one square at a time. But the combat was real-time, and they had some pretty nasty beasties in there (stuff that seemed right out of Aliens), and all kinds of cool guns and gear (even stuff like auto-sentries). The ambient sounds were IMO better than Doom's, though the grafix were much less good. The gameplay was spot on, and there were some interesting puzzles in there.
The PC version wasn't nearly as good though.
I don't really have anything interesting to say, but here's some random thoughts:
/., as the Aleph One project could really use the traffic and attention. Those guys are great...
;-)
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
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
Back then, the game was notable for besting...
"Back then", nobody cared. But now Bungie made Halo and suddenly everyone talks about Marathon like they knew about it before Halo.
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
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
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 wall poster - out of stock, I suppose.
For about a year, all I played was the Marathon series (and a bit of Mechwarrior 2). That game was so damn addictive! I can not recall a game with a deeper plot. Thanks for the good times, Jason & Alex & all the team!
Circumcision is child abuse.
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?
Please help metamoderate.
Oh, I get it. Spare apostrophe. If only /. had editors.
What spare apostrophe? "[T]he game's notable for its connections..." is grammatically correct, though "the game is" would be more formal. Maybe you should make sure that your knowledge of English is correct before you start making fun of others'.
Rob
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...
You know, 's is also a way of adding an "is" after a word. Think about it:
The game is notable for its connections to the Halo Franchise.
Another example: Saying "he's" is the same thing as saying "he is".
Works, doesn't it?
Pay more attention in English Class before you go around commenting on "incorrect" grammar.
In most English-speaking countries, "the game's notable for ..." is short for "the game is notable for ..." Removing the apostrophe is incorrect; you would end up with "the games notable for ..." which refers to more than one game.
it's perfectly fine to colloquially tack on is to things using apostrophes. For example, "your complaint's unfounded."
Wow, I have to stretch my memory back a while, but you are incorrect about Doom's storyline. Doom actually does have a written storyline to it. I remember after buying the Doom demo at EB on two floppies, it asked if you if you wanted to print out the story line before playing.
I made the mistake of saying yes, and many many pages kept rolling out of my printer. I never got around to reading all of it, but there was a fairly in depth storyline outside of the game.
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.
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?
The story was far better than that of Doom. Hell, it eclipses most games these days, let alone Doom's flimsy "Hell on... Mars!" plotline.
Doom had the better gameplay, I agree with that. But its plotline wasn't even in the same league as that of Doom.
I realise this should probably be moderated "redundant", as so many have said the same thing, but I felt this was something that had to be backed up.
I am one of the Sevens
e ve ns.html
http://marathon.bungie.org/story/_page2401/thes
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Back then, the game was notable ...
Funny that today was the first I've heard of it.
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.
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 players on different machines. You could vote to figure out what to do next... chat... even go on hunting parties! I've never had so much fun with a 512x384 grayscale game before!
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.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
http://source.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 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 full copy of Marathon?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Marathon was nothing compared to Escape Velocity, and especially Escape Velocity: Override!!! Those two games were the reasons why I really really wanted a Mac. Now I want a Mac because OSX is pretty and chicks dig Macs.
read the bunni comic
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
I've been playing through M1A1, and it still holds up pretty well.
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...
Clear, Dark Skies
Thank you....
You have sadi most clearly how i felt....
DOOM did not have as complex gameplay. But it's "world" felt richer, more horror filled. It was "a nightmare"
I remember playing Bungie's game and i thought there were some technical improvements. However, I found that everyone i showed it too just laughed and mocked it's chirping insectoid aliens.
*shrug*
There was no fear, no suspense...I was playing a game and I knew I was playing a game. When I ran...I ran away out of frustration for my character not to die.
When I ran in DOOM it was fear and being over-whelmed. My characters heart beat as did my own.
Bungie's game never quite did that...
Even Halo which I think has some of the best gameplay and awesome story still does not approach the "nightmare" that was ID. Strangely, the only game in recent times to have that "nightmare" affect was "The Thing" on Xbox.
But gameply was a little lacking there...if i had more time i'd have probably finished it.
The best Mac game EVAH. Recently found a copy for my Classic II. Gorgeous. Wonderful use of the mouse for control, too.
All else is heresy!
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
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.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
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
...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 difference between a roomful of alien warriors and a carpet of them is a matter of seconds.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
What spare apostrophe? "[T]he game's notable for its connections..." is grammatically correct, though "the game is" would be more formal. Maybe you should make sure that your knowledge of English is correct before you start making fun of others'.
Umm... No, it is not grammatically correct.
It is correct only if 1) we recognize "game's" as a contraction, or 2) "game's" shows possession.
Addressing (2), it is clear that their is no intent to express possession. Addressing (1), "game's" is no more an acceptable contraction than is "possess'on."
There is no Law of Grammar stating, "Thou shalt know the derivation of contractions and keep it holy: substitute an apostrophe for a vowel in the final three letters of a word."
The only correct rendering of the phrase in question is, "The game is notable... "
I have the Marathon Trilogy box set on my desk as I type this. Best game software purchase I ever made. I don't even generally like video games, but I tried the limited 4 level demo and got completely hooked. I had to buy it. Aleph One, as mentioned above, lets you play it on modern Mac and Windows systems as long as you can find an old copy of Marathon 2 or Infinity. It runs great on my Powerbook. Ebay may be your best bet at this time to find the original games. Since no one mentioned it, I thought I'd bring up the great free mod Marathon Evil, which extends the story and features great new and updated aliens. It would be even better if they had hired someone who passed 9th grade English to write their terminal messages. Other than that, it's wicked. Check it out. http://bighouse.bungie.org/evil/
Quote: What's that? Oh. Never mind.
/sarcasm
what's WHAT is that?
(dumb ass, lol)
Heretic had up/down. So did ROT (wolfenstein clss code), as I recall. Of course, Marathon still rocks - I even bought a mac copy to be able to play it with Aleph One.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
I just went looking at some screenshots. I remember now. The awful design. I didn't have an eye for it at the time, but it DOES obviously do a technically better 3D environment than Doom did. It DOESN'T look as good, though.
Doom was slick. It was cool. You were fighting demons from hell (most of whom looked right enough), and it damn well looked like that's what you should have been fighting.
Marathon looks like you should be playing as Ronald McDonald, hunting down Hamburglar.
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. Crystal Quest, Scarab of Ra, Pinball Construction Set... and that's long before games like Myst came along. We Mac folk, once upon a dime, did damn well without color. Damn well.
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 difficult to do well.
Chipwits was a very addicting game. Mike Johnston (co-creator) was supposed to be releasing an update for Windows/MacOSX, but I haven't seen anything yet.
Closest you'll probably get to the original Chipwits is GNU Robots. (Disclaimer: I'm the original author of GNU Robots, but I handed that off years ago... looks like someone has picked it up again!)
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.
In high school, I used a mac for tw0 reasons. To play Marathon, or to try to get the data off a disk that I had no idea what the source. Years later, I feel bad about the "punt" to the mac OS, but it was the best OS for publishing. JjP
Do you experience this, trying out the game for 5 minutes? Did it have anything to really grab someone, who hadn't been exposed to this sort of thing for years?
Sure, if you owned a mac and didn't have a CHOICE.
Now I guess I'll have to wait for a couple of years for Halo 2 to make it to Mac OSX.
AFAIK, Halo 2 has not even been announced for the PC yet, much less the Mac. It's possible that Bungie could skip Halo 2 for the PC and Mac, so you may have to invest in that XBox if you want to play it.
Oni is still a big sore spot with me...even more so than the XBoxification of Halo. They tore multiplayer out of Oni just before releasing it, with the lame excuse that people wouldn't be happy with internet play. Well whoop de frikkin do! Marathon, the subject of this story, had multiplayer years before most people had internet access! If Oni had been released with multiplayer and modding tools, it would have been one of the coolest games ever.
fukkin Microsoft
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
Marathon was a good game, but not moreso than many other heavily DOOM-inspired games. The difference is that Marathon was released for the Mac *before* DOOM was ported to the Mac. Lots of other games in the same vein hit the PC around the same time, but they were lost admid all the other similar games. Marathon 2 was a huge flop when released for the PC.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling Marathon *awful*, just more derivative than not. (And, yes, I've played both Marathon and DOOM.)
Don't forget Dark Castle.
Sure, if you owned a mac and didn't have a CHOICE.
I was playing DOOM on the Mac in late 1995. And I was playing Wolf3D on the Mac during Christmas 1993. A little behind the DOS world, but not too bad. Games are still fun even 2 years after their release.
DMUKYA
... 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.
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...
So if a game is not longer available for purchase ANYWHERE and it is officially one decade old, is that when it is okay for me to give my buddy a copy?
it was rather choppy, but it was still immersive, :|
:-)
and I enjoyed playing the demo version. I would
like to get the full version of Marathon 1, but
alas, I don't have a Mac that can run it anymore
Oh, I also have fond memories of using ResEdit
and changing some of the alien sounds, so they
said in a whiny voice "I'm a little happy bug,
and I'm going to get you!"
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. :|
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.
that's great, we are so glad to hear that you aren't going to buy a game box of any sort because you have a superior G5. Awesome. I think I can sleep better at night, just knowing this.
Also, Marathon and Doom play in a very similar way, with the 2.5D graphics and sprite-animation. In doom, both you and monsters move faster than in Marathon, though.
Bungie called Marathon a 5D game. For example, if you build the map properly, two people can go in opposite directions around a pillar and end up in vastly different places.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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?
Anyone remember the x2 and x3 life power-ups? We used to call those lemonades (yellow) and pink lemonades (pink) back when we played LAN games at BMUG's office (berkeley mac user group). Bungie even came in and did a presentation of their games for us after our 100 person LAN battle. That was where we all got a first glimpse of Myth before its release.
I even got won a tshirt at the raffle Bungie did. I don't think they sell it anymore, but I still have it. On the front it had the Bungie logo, on the back it said "Don't make us kick your ass."
Fantastic stuff.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Don't forget to check out that wikipedia article on Marathon. Very informative (when I found it it lacked the BOB section, crime upon crimes!)
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Did anyone else resort to that program (hack) to get their marathon fix? Holy crap, what a disaster...
For those unfamilier: Marathon and M:2 and M:i didn't have anyway to network over modems, or tcp/ip. NR was a semi-functional program that created an AppleTalk network over modem. Obviously, Marathon was not designed to run over a simulated AppleTalk network via a 21600 baud modem connection. But when my friends and I couldn't lug around our Power Mac 7100's, it was the only choice.
In more than one way even Quake was not as much fun as Marathon. It sure looked better though!
Quake looked pretty shitty compared to Marathon. I had a 33mhz 68030 running Marathon and it easily looked as good as my Pentium 100 running Quake. Later when GL Quake came out and I got a 3dfx card that changed, a lot, but the base game on stock hardware; Marathon took the cake.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Back when it was called Tribes or something... :)
-dameron
How could you forget Myst, probably the biggest seller for both PCs and Macs?
You must not have played Evil.
When I picture myself running down those dark cooridors I can still hear the devlin scream.
When they came leaping at me, I almost jumped out of my chair.
Oh, and unlike the monsters in the original game, they were faster than you. Running was not an option.
King of the Hill in that circular arena with the "hill" as the stripe down the middle...DAMN that was fun.
To this day, I've never played a multiplayer game that's a better time than MP King of the Hill in Marathon.
Deathmatch bores me.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I for one am glad to see Bungie keeping Thunderdome alive in Halo 2, except it's called Foundation now.
We used to play until the sun came up! Thunderdome, Beyond Thunderdome, Everyone's Mortal But Me, 16th parallel etc..
Another 1st Marathon had was dual wielding! you could use 2 pistols or 2 shotguns. Definitely glad to see that return in Halo 2!
Hell yes, and don't forget Beyond Dark Castle either!
Both of these are on the Mac Garden aswell, but I'm not sure if I should link an abandonware site here.
The colored version from Delta Tao looks kinda cheesy if you ask me, but Return to Dark Castle looks promising. If they only just finished the damn game. :p
Alas, my "gods" turned out to be only too mortal after all and sold their souls to the devil, forsaking those of us who supported them by buying all their games, and relegating their brilliance to the position of yet-another-tentacle on the ever-growing beast whose interest had turned to video games, another market it had no interest in enriching, only dominating.
It won't take away my fond memories of Marathon and those early games, but I have no interest in Halo. That's not Bungie! Don't let the logo fool you. If you like the game, great, but it's not Bungie. The spirit has gone elsewhere.
Sad and dishonorable end to a great game company.
Oh well... good memories just the same.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
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.
Not only that... when you were in a big firefight with a bunch of aliens, and some of them got hit by friendly fire from other aliens, they'd break off from fighting you and turn on their own. I loved that!
So Marathon, which was released December 1994, surpassed a game that was released one year earlier in December 1993, bfd.
Was it better than System Shock? That's a 1994 game. Or Star Wars: Dark Forces, released 3 months later in March 1995?
Oh how I hate(d) those FPS where you could save your current game everywhere and as often as you'd like. They just didn't make sense. Just save, get around next corner and if you survive, save again. Booooring as hell. I just could'n stand playing Doom for more than a few minutes. Marathon had the concept of "places" (well, terminals) where you could save and nowhere else. THIS MADE SENSE! Many times you just couldn't go back to these places. This was AWESOME! I remember wandering through new levels, having not been able to save for the last 20 or 30 minutes ... not knowing where the next save game terminal ist and having only a short red indicator of the remaining armour. The next hit will kill you and you have to play from the last terminal again ... and again ... until you manage to do it right. Your heart is beating as you look around the corner. What will you see? An enimy? Someone firing at you? A save game terminal? A recharging terminal? Oh man, my hartreate was constantly high ...
They just don't make games like that anymore.
"Life is a heuristic guided depth-first search without backtracking"
...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 now. This site might be of help for some.
Happily, I just find my Action Sack CD, and I may be able to find a Mac that can play the old QuickTime and then record the output--it would be nice to record the music as it was meant to be heard.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Was it better than System Shock? That's a 1994 game. Or Star Wars: Dark Forces, released 3 months later in March 1995?
Yes, but inferior to Duke Nukem 3D, so it really was a very tiny window of time in which Mac owners could claim an obvious FPS edge.
Once Quake got the 3D/FX patch, it was all over but the cryin'. From then on, Windows was the platform of the LAN party.
Which is fine. I still keep a Windows PC around for games. I wouldn't want to use it for anything important, but it's a nice game machine. (People who remember Mac/PC flame wars from the early 90's will find that comment funny, anyway.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We had "status update meetings." They were the best.
You don't develop a game like that in 6-8 months. In comparison with Doom it was huge. Giant story, much more depth, more features....
Doom was released in 1993. Marathon in 1994. That's just because Doom was a hell of a lot easier to finish making.
Flat ugly graphics and textures, tedious repetative levels? No way, Marathon was an also-ran in the FPS game back then, it only got recognition because it was the only FPS available on Mac at the time.
Blar.
the game wasn't ottomatic, it was called quagmire. and it rocked.
My favorite was multi-player death matches. Making your own maps and tweaking the weapons was TOO much fun!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
It was approximately 8 years ago that I sat in a similar situation, on a snowboarding trip using Greg Kirkpatrick's Powerbook, creating Route 66, a map for Marathon Infinity.
Before heading out this morning to the slopes, I discovered our cabin had DSL. Checking Slashdot, I noticed this story. Brings back a lot of memories: playing Marathon until the wee hours after graduating high school, meeting the Bungie crew at Macworld shortly after Marathon's release in 1995, getting hired a year later to work on Infinity.
Shouts to the ex-Brooklyn crew.
Your reply came three hours late but you still win, sir.
Rob (Why didn't I think of that?)
E1M4 Rocket jump
MAP14 Arch-vile jump
Who cares? Marathon may have had more of a story, but it was also slow, plodding, and boring as hell.
'appeals better to your id than to your superego'
You do know that Freudian psychology is complete bullshit, right? Good ol' Sigmund pulled it all out of his ass.
If up/down movement is your criterion for Id catching up with Bungie, you're wrong. Id had up/down movement capability in the Doom engine, but (according to interviews I've seen) they explicitly chose to not use it in the game. They decided the controls should be as simple as possible, since it was supposed to be a visceral reaction game. Keyboards and joysticks were to be the primary methods of control (remember, it wasn't until _after_ Doom became a megahit that mice became popular controllers for FPS games -- and besides, in the early 90s many PCs lacked mice). Looking up/down on joysticks or keyboards required two additional buttons, so in their effort to keep the controls simple, id locked the view at straight horizontal and added a vertical auto-aim feature.
(In coding terms, by the way, looking up or down in a 2.5D engine like Doom or Marathon was dead simple, at least in the form used in Marathon and unused in Doom. By dead simple I mean that it falls out of how the 2.5D engines worked -- you didn't have to do any extra work to support it. So we're not talking about a major technological innovation anyways.)
Check out ZSculpt. They are working on Dark Castle and have a few other well-done Mac-only games. http://zsculpt.com/
http://www.bynarystudio.com
I made bungiesellout.org back at the time of the whole, well sellout debacle, it was a good place for Bungie/Marathon fans to reminisce. I have an archive here
Holy hell, I had totally forgotten about that game, but as soon as I read the name of it, all of these great memories came flooding back to me... thanks! That game really was amazing for its time, and damn it was fun :) And all this time all I could remember in terms of good mac games was marathon :P
Joseph?
I remember walking around MW Boston 1997 (the last one??) and speaking with a group of developers who were creating a space shooter game called ARES. I don't know if it ever made it to market.
--Mike
There have been quite a few Marathon spinoffs, but I don't really remember too many of them ever nearing a stage that could be considered complete.
Maybe this will change? Marathon is still a pretty cool game.
Glad to help out with your beauty sleep. You know a good nights sleep will do wonders for your outlook on life.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
It's graphics and AI kicked the living shit out of Doom, Quake, or anything after it for a good many years. There are still games today that can barely hold their own against Marathon and Marathon 2. The physics controls of Marathon 2 are still many times better than more current games like MOHAA, SOF2, and others. H2 is finally able to compete in that arena. Those guys at Bungie were something else. It was a sad day when Microsoft bought them (as it is for all companies that get assimulated by The MS Borg(tm).
Oh dear, I remember that one. First 3D game I played on my Mac Plus. Oh-so cyberspace. :)
I remember coming back to my dorm room after class and having about 50 Broadcast windows up announcing Marathon games, parties, etc!
By the way, did you use the standard 3x4 icon pop-up menu (only 12 icons in that), or the version I hacked with ResEdit to make it 8 x 12 cells for icons (and filled them up with whatever goofy icons I could find)? It spread around Drexel University (Philadelphia) like crazy after I put it in my public AppleShare folder. :-)
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.