Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
"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!
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.