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Classic Mac FPS Marathon Turns 10

Posted by timothy on 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."

10 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Thats nice and all... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    But Church is still trapped there, and the blue team does not seem very concerned. o_O

  2. Marathon was awesome! by Eric(b0mb)Dennis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Mac-games by hermeshome.se · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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*.

    1. Re:Mac-games by HeghmoH · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
  4. RvB! by Eric(b0mb)Dennis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Red vs Blue rocks my socks!

    Check it out.

    --
    Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
  5. Re:Uh... not quite by theKinkyRabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Uh... not quite by tirefire · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. I remember... by mfifer · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  8. Ah, Marathon. by indig0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  9. Re:Is... by ollie_ob · · Score: 5, Funny

    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