Pfhor Fighters

The cannon fodder enemies of the Marathon series, equivalent to Halo's grunts, are the tall, long-limbed, three-eyed, color-coded, masked Pfhor fighters. One can easily imagine that the idea for Grunts started with the Pfhor fighters with their limb length and height drastically reduced, removing the third visible eye, and exchanging the long staff weapon with plasma pistols, needlers, and eventually fuel rod guns. As with Grunts and Elites in Halo, enemy ranks are indicated by colors, with the more rarely occurring colors indicating relative strength.

Marathon Released

After agonizing delays and fan outcries since August, the release date that Bungie promised at MacWorld Boston that year, Marathon finally ships just before Christmas of 1994, a fully texture-mapped first person shooter with an engrossing science fiction plot.

The game takes place on the sprawling colony ship Marathon, hollowed out from Deimos, a moon of Mars. Told through a series of text terminals, a Byzantine plot gradually unfolds telling a story of military cyborgs, rampant artificial intelligences, and alien slavers.

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12/21/1994

Bungie shows Marathon

At the second MacWorld show that year, this time in Boston, Bungie demonstrates the greatly revamped Marathon game, with a graphics engine rewritten since earlier in the year and an entirely new plotline.

Bungie supposedly tells showgoers that the game will ship "in two weeks" according to the Marathon Scrapbook, saying they were waiting only on the boxes.

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08/01/1994

Marathon Infinity Released

Again less than 12 months passes between releases. Admittedly, Bungie only published Marathon Infinity. Double Aught created the scenario, which used the Marathon 2 engine largely unchanged.

Double Aught was headed by Greg Kirkpatrick and Randy Reddig. The group later planned to build a portal-based engine for a game to be called Duality, which was never completed or released.

Kirkpatrick had previously worked at Bungie and founded Double Aught.

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10/15/1996

Chomber

"Chomber" from Marathon. Out of place rests are Sibelius's fault. The four ascending notes confused me. Perhaps someone else has an idea... The little box at the bottom line should be followed very closely.

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