Marathon

Released in December 1994 by Bungie software, this was not exactly the first FPS developed for the Mac (there were one or two previous similar titles from Bungie themselves), but just like Doom on the PC, it was the first that was widely noticed. It was quickly followed by two sequels, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity. Marathon 2: Durandal was available in a Windows version, too, but was only moderately successful on this platform and is more or less forgotten among PC gamers. Marathon remained a Macintosh game, and a Macintosh legend.

Each platform has its own favorite genres; for the Mac, the FPS is not among them. As far as I know, the Marathon Trilogy has remained unique in this respect. Later on, most of the important FPS games were ported, from Wolfenstein 3D (which, in spite of dumbed-down gameplay, was surprisingly successful) to Quake III Arena. Most of them found a more or less lukewarm reception. Marathon, however, became a legend.

If you know the Macintosh culture a bit, this will not really astound you. Nor will it astound you that Marathon was a bit different from other contemporary shooter games.

1. It was somewhat advanced as far as graphics and sound are concerned, and offered options not yet common among shooter games, such as the ability to look up and down (a process known as vidding) or a rudimentary inventory.
2. It took a more strategic approach than the usual stay alive and reach the next level premise. Some levels contained special assignments.
3. As a sidenote, you could only save your game at certain spots, like in a console RPG, and there were no cheat codes at all.
4. But most of all, it had a deep and complicated storyline which slowly unravelled by means of terminals, similar to System Shock. It is this aspect especially that the fans of Marathon love.

Vidmasters

I pledge to punch all switches, to never shoot where I could use grenades, to admit the existence of no level except Total Carnage, to never use Caps Lock as my 'run' key, and to never, ever, leave a single Bob alive.—The Marathon Vidmaster's Page

The part with the Caps Lock key had me mystified for a while. Solution: On older Macintosh keyboards, the Caps Lock key stays down when you hit it. It is locked mechanically until you hit it again. Thus, assigning run to the Caps Lock key would mean that you run all the time without having to do anything about it.

It is your sworn duty as a security officer to protect Bob.—Marathon Manual page 15

Bobs are a darker chapter in Vidmasterdom. They are the space colonist you are supposed to protect and save from the evil Pfhor, your true enemies. Strangely enough, they became the favorite target of Marathon players.

As you may have guessed by now, Vidmasters are the elite of Marathon players. The term is derived from vidding, looking up and down. The opposite of a Vidmaster is a Spazeroid. A Spazeroid is someone who plays Marathon on a low difficulty level. Someone who uses Caps Lock as the run key. Someone you thoroughly and utterly despise.

Of Course, Some Links

• Marathon Central

  Welcome to the largest archive of Marathon information on the Internet. If you've never heard of this award winning game, we suggest you ask the person sitting next to you… Chances are they've played it.

• Dr. Lex' Marathon Page

  If you are a VidMaster already, you'll enjoy the Marathon Infinity maps (not found on the Trilogy CD—and that's not because they're bad, they were created after its release!) If you aren't, you have the chance to become one by reading the VidMaster Techniques!

• Marathon's Story: Researched, interpreted, and transcribed to 1's and 0's by Hamish Sinclair

  Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and Marathon Infinity are more than just excellent games for the Mac OS and Windows 95 (Marathon 2 only), they tell a 'story'. It is a complex story revealed in a novel way through a series of computer interface terminals. As you play you find that not all the terminals are easily found and even when found the text presented is sometimes difficult to interpret. Added to this is the fact that the story is not told in a linear fashion. The past and present are intermingled, a jigsaw of facts which need to be pieced together to form a cohesive story.

• Marathon Map Makers Guild

  We are in the dawn of a new era with Marathon scenarios. With the release of the Marathon 2 source code, and the subsequent Aleph One project, the reach of Marathon scenarios has been greatly extended. Bungie is now a Microsoft company, so as the MMMG drifts away from Bungie, we are becoming more engulfed in the Marathon world they left behind.

• Marathon Sight Patches

  These Marathon patches create software sights for most weapons. They are intended to replace the ugly hardware sights (stickers) on the average Marathon player monitor. Given an original Shapes file the patcher creates a new Shapes file which is identical to the original Shapes file except that now there are nice sights for most weapons.

• The Trilogy Release

  All files are in stuffit format. (Windows-compatible versions coming soon.) Marathon is copyright 1994–present Bungie Studios, all rights reserved. Files are freely downloadable, but are not open-source. Bandwidth provided by bungie.org—be gentle.

• Marathon Aleph One

  Aleph One is an open-source descendant of Bungie's Marathon 2 first-person 3D shooting game. A1 plays Marathon 2, Infinity, and 3rd-party content on a wide array of platforms, with (optional) OpenGL rendering, Internet play, Lua scripting, and more.

• Scott's Addictions

  If you've not played Marathon, go buy it today. It still offers one of the best multi-player experiences out there and hardware is such that Marathon screams on every model that has come out in at least the past year.

  This article was written in 1997, most of the links on the page are broken.

Loren Petrich's Patch

• Loren Petrich's Marathon Page
• The Making of an All-Female Patch, article on WomanGamers.

  I had gotten the idea of a sex-change patch from seeing some others' efforts in that area, and I wanted to do a dignified sex-change patch. Some of the others featured women in bikinis—or less—which I felt was an inappropriate sort of clothing for the part.

• Female-Bobs arrive at Dusk, article by Anne-Marie Schleiner.

Final Notes

I first wrote this page in May 2003, back then you could still download the demos for all the old Bungie games from their website, but they were not yet released as freeware. I cannot say much about the system requirements except that it runs on system 6.0.5 and above. This is true for the first game, later ones might need system 7.

I played the demo on my Performa 630, where it ran well performance-wise. It might run well on a 68030 too, I don't know. I say performance-wise, because it did not run well in other ways: I found no way to quit or get back to the menu. It even disabled the power buttons, both the one on the keyboard and on the Mac itself, leaving me with no alternative to literally pulling the plug.

As for the revolutionary features, I wasn't overly impressed. I'm not a big fan of the FPS genre in general, but I sure never missed a story or plot in these games. The return to the annoying savepoint system is a big step back in my eyes, and in any case the tendency to transcend the genre was already there, just take System Shock as an example.

But it certainly is a classic, and if you want to play a shooter on your Mac, why play a port when you can play an original?