Marathon Trilogy Now Free
Bungie (now a subsidiary of
Microsoft) have just released the Marathon Trilogy. For
those who’ve not heard of it, Marathon came out at about the same
time as Doom did for PCs. Despite being roughly contemporaneous,
Marathon was much more advanced: while on only aimed horizontally in
Doom, Marathon supported full horizontal and vertical aiming;
while the PC game was very two-dimensional (with just the illusion of
3D), the Mac standard was fully (albeit primitively) three-dimensional;
but most importantly where Doom had no story other than kill lots of
things before they kill you
, Marathon had a complex story of aliens
and an insane computer who was both ally and foe.
Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity carried on that tradition of excellent stories, with perhaps the best storylines of any first-person-shooter I’ve ever played, stories almost good enough for interactive fiction. Indeed, the Marathon series were a kind of interactive fiction with a shoot-em-up component.
Although now long-outdated, the source for Marathon Infinity was released years ago by Bungie and has now given birth to Marathon: Aleph One, with which it is possible to play the latter two of the original trilogy, but with better sounds and graphics. Marathon lives on!
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