The most recent Preferred Player column over at Xbox.com, penned by KP, is on Freeverse's XBLA port of Marathon: Durandal; specifically, an XBL cooperative game of Marathon the author played with yours truly and other notable Bungiefen Geary11 and ZuP101.

Not to be outdone, TriXie did an interview with Halo and Marathon player SniperStealth, the very same that Rampancy interviewed last week when SS nailed the top spot on the Marathon: Durandal single player leaderboard.

I've been playing the heck out of Freeverse's Marathon: Durandal on Xbox Live. As it's an "old school" shooter missing a lot of the technical features found in more modern games, I had always assumed that the majority of its players would be old-time Bungie fans like myself.

When I saw SniperStealth atop the single-player leaderboard with over thirty million points, I felt here must surely be an old Marathon hand who knows every twist and turn of each level without even glancing at the map.

That's not true, as it turns out. SniperStealth only had a chance to play the original briefly before diving into M:D on XBLA, but that can only be good news for Freeverse if more Bungie fans who haven't played Marathon check in to see where the roots of Halo came from.

SniperStealth was kind enough to spend a few moments to answer my questions about what drew him to this classic game.

Click "read more" from the front page for the transcript of Rampancy's interview with SniperStealth, the leading Marathon: Durandal campaign player.

Bruce "Hippieman" Morrison at Freeverse, the developer that brought Bungie's Marathon: Durandal to Xbox Live Arcade, has been working on a walkthrough of the game. While of course there is always the Marathon Spoiler Guide, which covers all three games, Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon: Infinity, Hippieman's walkthrough includes screenshots of environments, whereas the Spoiler Guide features only maps.

Currently Hippieman's walkthrough is a work in progress; you can download the latest version to see how far he's gotten; he announced the file in this thread in the Xbox forums.

For those who need a different kind of help with the game-- the kind needed to wring all 200 gamerscore points out of it-- Xyjar posted a Marathon: Durandal Achievement Guide.

Major Nelson says that Marathon Durandal is one of two games that will hit Xbox Live Arcade this week; specifically, on Wednesday, when XBLA gets its weekly update.

Durandal wll cost 800 points. For more information and screenshots, check the Marathon Durandal page at Xbox.com.

UPDATE: Over in the HBO forum, RotaJota found an interview with Bruce "Hippieman" Morrison about the game, and Gifty located what looks like a list of the game's achievements.

Luke Smith has posted an interview with Freeverse's Bruce Morrison over at Bungie.net to explain how and why Marathon is coming to the Xbox and the role that the Bungie community played in it:

In 2004 Freeverse hired two new employees, Mark Levin and Bruce Morrison. You might know Mark as "Count Zero" or "HaveBlue" from HBO and Bruce as "Hippieman" from Marathon.org. It wasn't long after that Mike Watson or "Patient Zero" from Bungie.org came to work at Freeverse and finally Steven Cento from the Myth community joined up in 2006 (He had done contract work for Freeverse for many years previous).

This was the core team to work on Marathon, and with good reason, everyone on the team had worked in Forge and Anvil. Mark worked on Aleph One and Steven had designed Myth tools and was familiar with Bungie's file format. It was a perfect match. These guys idolized Bungie and Marathon, and they knew how to treat the series with the respect and love it deserves.

Word is that Marathon 2: Durandal was chosen for XBLA because it is "the more accomplished and feature rich game, more modes of play and a better Campaign mode" according to Smith. That's Bungiespeak for "we still have the source code."

Ok, this time it is for real, because it's from the horse's mouth, which is certainly the most trustworthy orifice on a horse. Bungie.net says that Marathon: Durandal is being brought to XBLA by none other than Mac game developer Freeverse. They have a page on Marathon: Durandal at their site.

It will include single player, eight player cooperative play, and multiplayer.

Eight player coop? Zang!

Kotaku is liveblogging the Microsoft press event at E3 Lite, and Brian Crecente has Marathon on his list of XBLA titles being mentioned. Stay tuned while we confirm.

Rumors of such a port have been floating around for some time, and recently a German ratings board had the title appear briefly in its database according to a German gaming site.

No, I don't mean an XBLA release of Marathon, as it seems that is not to be; but rather, what was thought to be a long-dormant project to make a total conversion of Marathon 1 for the Unreal Tournament engine-- Marathon Resurrection-- has finally been released as a Final Candidate.

If you find the open source version of Marathon, Aleph One, still too low-tech for your tastes, but still want to sample Bungie's pre-Halo SF trilogy, have a look.

According to XBLArcade.com, German website xbox-arkiv says that the German ratings board, the USK, has been asked to rate Marathon 2: Durandal, indicating that a port of the Bungie shooter classic, already open sourced and available as Aleph One will be making its way to Xbox Live Arcade sometime in the future.