Know Your Roots: Marathon on XBLA?

Years and years ago, in the days when SNES was still king, and the Internet was still just a whisper, a studio named Bungie came out with a Macintosh only game called Marathon. Back then I was a complete Mac fanboy, having grown up with only Apple computers in my house. Marathon came around and totally blew away the Doom I was playing over at my PC using friend’s house. Marathon put you on an alien planet where you ran around shooting aliens into goo, with pseudo 3D graphics (amazing at the time) and fantastic gameplay. And there was quite a story too. You played a cyborg who crash lands on a planet with aliens who are attempting to take over your ship. You interact with the ship’s various AI’s to enable the defenses, learn the backstory, and fight off the invaders.

There were all sorts of interesting gameplay elements, such as the level where you have no oxygen and have to hurry between oxygen stations, or die. Marathon was my favorite computer game, and although it was extremely popular with us Mac heads, the rest of the PC world was pretty oblivious to it. Marthon 2 came out, followed by Marthon Infinity (which was awarded by MacFormat at the time for the “largest version number increase”), both bringing new advances to the games. There was even a level editor included, that allowed the player to create their own maps, and send them off to friends.

Following the success of Marathon, the studio went on to create a game you may have heard of, Halo. Originally going to be another Mac only title, Microsoft saw the promise of this property and scooped up the studio, so this could be their flagship title in their push towards console gaming. It is very possible that the Xbox would have been a failure without Halo, and there would be no Halo without Marathon. I was extremely late in the game on playing Halo. I didn’t own an original Xbox, and only played Halo once I bought it used shortly after getting a 360. But one of the first things I noticed was the Marathon logo on the captain in one of the first cut scenes. (The second thing was me remarking “What the hell kind of name is Master Chief?”)

Which brings me to the present. Halo 3 is on the horizon, but there is news that Bungie may be thinking of releasing Marathon as an Xbox Live Arcade title. My hopes are that they are not just going to port the original game, which, while it has the great gameplay, simply doesn’t have the graphics by today’s standards. Truth be told, Bungie distributes the old games for free on Mac and PC, but an updated, tight game, with perhaps actual creature and character models to replace the 2d sprites, and a cohesive integration with Xbox Live could be a fantastic way to hold everyone over until Halo 3.