Marathon: Never stop running, never stop firing

schwern on 2005-08-22T17:48:31

Cross over the cell bars, find a new maze, make the maze from it's path, find the cell bars, cross over the bars, find a maze, make the maze from its path, eat the food, eat the path.

I just noticed that back in January Bungie released the Marathon Trilogy for free (beer). Previously they had released the Marathon 2/Infinity engine for free (freedom) and it has since been developed for modern systems under the name Aleph One. But the maps for Marathon were not available for download. You had to own a copy of the game. Since it was released in the mid 90s its a wee bit hard to find. As its no longer available for sale Bungie decided to just give it away. You want to download the complete "A1/SDL files" and then drop a copy of the Aleph One application into the resulting directory to get it going. For Marathon 1 use the M1A1 conversion.

For those who never played this game, and you probably haven't unless you were a Mac gamer in the mid 90s (a woe be unto you for that), its a contemporary of Doom yet far suprior in graphics, level design, gameplay and story. Its a 3D shooter instead of the 2D (with a 3rd faked) of Doom. The engine still holds up well, but its nothing compared to, say, Quake 3. The engine isn't the point. The point is the story.


Marathon is connected to Halo.

Louis_Wu on 2005-08-23T20:18:27

And Halo is the reason I've got Marathon sitting on my mac waiting for more copious free time. Halo.bungie.org has a great story page speculating on connections between Halo and Marathon.

Oh, btw, Bungie is Bungie.net. From the bungie.org page: Bungie.org is an independently owned and operated fansite and is not affiliated with Bungie Studios. But Bungie_the_company really appreciates it's fans, as you can see when their front page news articles link back to Bungie_the_fans. (The link at the bottom of the article is to a bungie.org hosted comic.)