Apocalypse Then: Marathon

15 Years of Marathon

On this day in gaming, 21 December, in 1994, a perhaps lesser known game by the name of Marathon was released.

Why do I say it’s lesser known? Because firstly it was released at a time when Doom and Doom II were on the scene, and secondly it was only for Macintosh. Despite being technologically advanced over other games like the aforementioned Doom games, not everyone knows about these games.

It’s a FPS developed and published by Bungie Studios, best known for the Halo series, which many claim is a spiritual successor to this series of games, collectively called the Marathon Trilogy,  which also consists of two sequels in Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity. The Marathon Trilogy is set in the same universe as Pathways Into Darkness, another Bungie title.

Marathon 2 was released for PC as well as Mac, unlike the other two games, and also made it onto XBLA. If anything it’s arguably the best known of the games because of appearances on these platforms.

About five years after the first game’s release, Marathon 2’s source code was released and after that a fan-made source port, Aleph One, was made, initially for Mac but later other platforms like Windows. More than ten years after the first game’s release, Bungie released the trilogy as freeware, and total conversions of the other two games in the series were made, so nowadays PC gamers can play all the games in the trilogy.

Apocalypse Then: Marathon