Bungie’s announcement of a reimagined Marathon as a PvP extraction shooter during the May 24 PlayStation Showcase was certainly a pleasant surprise. It was clear from comments on Twitter and in the live chat during the stream that there’s a whole generation of gamers unaware of the impressive 29 year legacy behind the name, and let’s face it: why would they be? Save for a free release designed to work on modern Macs, PCs, and Linux systems in 1999, an Xbox Live Arcade port of Marathon: Durandal in 2007, a port to iOS in 2011, and a bunch of easter eggs hidden in both Halo and Destiny (the Marathon symbol pops up all over the place in the first three Halo games, for example) the franchise has been left alone since the third game in the trilogy, Marathon: Infinity, released in October 1996.
While the new game will feature an Altered Carbon-style transfer of human consciousness into customizable clones that fight in a competitive extraction shooter scenario (if you’re unfamiliar with this most in-vogue genre of modern live service shooters, think Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown where you’re collecting loot and fighting against things in the environment as well as other players before getting out intact) the 1994 original was an early example of a methodical story-based first-person shooter, similar in some regards to Warren Spector’s System Shock which shipped that same year.
While the December 1993 release of Doom for MS-DOS-based PCs is remembered for establishing many of the conventions we take for granted today, Marathon’s contributions to the modern lexicon of game design are often overlooked because it was a Mac OS game.
There was a period during the early 2000s where Marathon was frequently included in many Top 100 games of all time lists alongside Doom, Quake and their ilk. For the past couple of decades though it has slowly faded in our collective memories. Regardless, its contribution to the way we play games can’t be ignored, so here are just some of the most important ways it has influenced the modern era.
Mouse-look
While not the first game to allow you to look around from a first-person perspective (Dark Forces, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Heretic all let you look up and down using the keyboard as far back as 1992), Marathon was the first game that coupled the camera to the mouse controls in the manner that we now all take for granted. This convention didn’t really emerge in PC games until a year later with Interplay’s release of the motion sickness-inducing Descent in March 1995, and it didn’t become the default standard for games before Bethesda’s unpopular and exceptionally crappy Terminator: Future Shock in August that same year. While most would credit iD Software’s 1996 release of Quake with popularizing the mechanic, it was Marathon that set us on this path.
Environment storytelling
So many modern games tell their stories through audio logs or journals conveniently left on nightstands that it’s become something of a cliché. While most of us would probably think of Ken Levine’s 2007 release of Bioshock as the quintessential “pick up what’s going on from stuff lying around in the environment” game, the technique was pioneered in Marathon. All major plot points were conveyed through entries on terminals found throughout the UESC Marathon – a giant colony ship carved out of Mars’ moon Deimos now orbiting Tau Ceti IV – and through messages from the three artificial intelligences that reside there, Leela, Durandal, and Tycho.
AI buddies
Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000 leading to the November 2001 release of Halo: Combat Evolved as a launch game for the original Xbox. Its path to release was tumultuous, seeing time as a real-time strategy game, a third-person action game and a first-person shooter, but it actually started out life as an indirect successor to the second game in the Marathon trilogy, Marathon Durandal. In hindsight much of that connection comes in the form of the relationship between the cipher-like security officer you play as with a charismatic artificial intelligence. Many of the moments we cherish throughout Bungie’s Halo games between Master Chief and Cortana owe a lot to the work designers Jason Jones and Alex Seropian did while writing the messages from Marathon’s command AI Leela and later the more manipulative Durandal. Even the term “rampancy” when used to describe Cortana and Guilty Spark’s enraged-states is a throwback to dialog from the first Marathon, where Leela describes Durandal with the same term to describe how it is thinking freely for itself and is consequently quite annoyed.
Existential musings on heady subjects
Every now and then a game sparks debate because of its psychological or sociological musings and earns a reputation for making you think outside of the experience itself. The Metal Gear games played on modern geopolitics and the military industrial complex, the first Bioshock game riffed on objectivism and players’ lack of true freedom. Marathon tackled similarly heady subjects more than 10 years before either of them. When the artificial intelligence Durandal takes over from Leela in guiding you through the objectives of the game, it begins to talk to you about the notions of freedom and its developing self-awareness. As the story unfolds you learn that the security officer is actually a cyborg super soldier – referred to as a Mjolnir Mark IV cyborg – which explains your unquestioning willingness as the player to slavishly follow instructions and complete tasks for the AIs aboard the ship. Similarly, Durandal questions its own slave-like existence and begins to push back, highlighting that not only are the two characters in the game quite similar, but you as the player are too.
It remains to be seen how much of the lore established in the original trilogy works its way into Bungie’s new title. Judging from the small amount of info shared on the game’s website, and what fans have unearthed from the elaborate ARG supporting the game’s launch it seems the new Marathon is set 56 years after the first and retains the giant colony ship and Tau Ceti IV setting from the original. At around the 48 second mark in the new teaser there’s a glimpse of a S’pht, a caped, floating cyborg alien with a big glowing green light in its chest that appeared in the original trilogy as both enemies and allies, hinting at what some of the PvE elements of the new title may be. It seems likely that the artifacts players will be collecting as noted in Bungie’s first ViDoc, and the “long dormant” AIs cited in the early material will be throwbacks to the earlier games, hinting that the new game may follow the original in revealing its narrative through environmental story elements.
Bungie says it is approaching alpha in its development of the game, and will be going dark for an extended period before showing actual gameplay and revealing the game’s release date. When it does launch, Marathon will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC and will feature cross play and save across all platforms.
John Davison is IGN’s publisher