Bungie's Marathon Trilogy

Kyle

For those of you who don't know, Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity were a FPS trilogy made by Bungie (makers of Halo) way before they were bought out by M$. They were all for Mac, but a PC version of Marathon 2 was released. Well when M$ bought Bungie they started the open source project called Aleph One which runs with better textures and uses OpenGL. The engine (which runs on XP, OSX or Linux) is free to download, but you need the game data files to play. These game data files were just recently released to be distributed freely. This means that all of you who were unfortunate enough to not play this groundbreaking FPS can enjoy it for free now (on Mac or Win).

I assume that most people won't bother actually playing these games if they're not really easy to download and install, so I tried to simplify it as much as possible. Note that Marathon 1's game files are a little set up differently than the other two games and require extra libraries, but they all follow the same installation principle: extract all of a particular game's files to a directory with Aleph One, run Aleph One, enjoy.

Aleph One

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http://sourceforge.net/projects/marathon (scroll down for download links)

Marathon 1 Game Files

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Win: http://archives2.bungie.org/a1sdl/m1a1_sdl.zip
OSX: http://archives2.bungie.org/mos.scenarios/m1a1.sit

SDL 1.2
Win: http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.8-win32.zip
OSX: http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.8.pkg.tar.gz

SDL Image Library
Win: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image/release/SDL_image-1.2.4-win32.zip
OSX: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image/release/SDL_image-1.2.4.pkg.tar.gz

Marathon 2 Game Files

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Win: http://files3.bungie.org/trilogy/marathon2.zip
OSX: http://files3.bungie.org/trilogy/marathon_2.sit

Marathon Inifinity Game Files

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Win: http://files3.bungie.org/trilogy/infinity.zip
OSX: http://files3.bungie.org/trilogy/marathon_infinity.sit


The Marathon Trilogy has the deepest (coolest too, imho) story of any game I've ever played, which is pretty amazing considering it's a FPS. Supposedly the character you play as in Marathon is the same "cyborg" as master chief in Halo. Every teeny-tiny tidbit of information and speculation about the story of Marathon can be found here:

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/

... even someone who has played the games could easily be overwhelmed by all the information on that site.

Marathon's Story Website wrote:

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.

I highly recommend everyone give these games an honest effort. I can't guarantee that you'll like it. But these games were pioneers in the genre, especially in the multiplayer aspect (why do you think Halo multiplayer is so good?), and it's worth the free download.

primesuspect

Thanks for compiling that info, Kyle. I've always wanted to play Marathon ever since I had a chance to demo it real quick on a friend's mac quite a few years ago.

evilkillermouse

I have the original on my old mac
I also have Abuse, a sidescrolling game by Bungie. Check it out here:
http://gamehippo.com/download1/download1_1011.shtml

Kyle

Yeah I think I have the original cds and instruction manuals around here somewhere. Abuse is awesome though! Maybe I'm just easy to please but I've really liked every game they've made... which easily makes them the best game makers around in my opinion.

RiversCuomo

Bungie used to be my favorite...but I believe the success of Halo1 changed them. I lost faith in them after Halo 2, were a great group of guys though. I read/watched a lot about them. It angered me unbelievably that they didnt listen to their fans in the making of Halo 2 and let everyone have an equal opinion. I know what I said sounds stupid but when you're making a game with a mindset to improve it and keep the same amazing experience, I would stick with the opinions of the guys that played that game non-stop, in-and-out and were amazing at it. We knew what to improve and what not to mess with, they talk to joe-blow from the street and he says "OMGZZ TEH PISTOL IS N00BSZNESS, TREE SHOT KILL, GET RID!!!one11!!!!!11!!!." Bungie has made some mistakes but I will always have a place for them in my heart

NLichtman

A game design professor(can't remember his name right now) once said, "As a game designer, you are only in charge of half of the experiance. The player is in charge of the other half..."
I got that from a Game Informer magazine article.