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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 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*.
This depends on your tastes.
I got sick of Doom pretty quickly, but I still play Marathon today on my old Mac.
Red vs Blue rocks my socks!
Check it out.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
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...
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
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.
#define ROSE any_other_name
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
I think everyone who had a Mac and was interested in gaming back then knew about Marathon. Granted, that's not a lot of people.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
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...
Yeah, me, Jack, and Ronny all had a good time with that.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
The game engine is open-source. The art, model files, sounds, music and level designs, however, are still very much Copyright Bungie Studios, now a division of Microsoft Games.
You can probably find a copy on ebay pretty cheaply.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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.
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.
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.
Umm... No, it is not grammatically correct.
..." and "the game's notable" are equivalent. If you're (a contraction for "you are," in case you didn't know) uncomfortable with this, try a few equivalent constructions:
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... "
You missed case 3: "___'s" as a recognized contraction for "___ is."
"The game is notable
"The cat is on the table" vs. "the cat's on the table."
"He is eating" vs. "he's eating."
"Anonymous Coward is an idiot" vs. "Anonymous Coward's an idiot."
See now?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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. =)
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
"I like them more then the Halo games Bungie's doing now."
You misspelled Microsoft.
Yes, I am still THAT bitter.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
... 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...
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?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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?
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.
We had "status update meetings." They were the best.
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.
- Sig