[image:9067 align=left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Frankie posted today in the HBO forum that the webcam image we spotted last month was, indeed, the Pippin version of Super Marathon.
[image:9067 align=left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]One of the Bungie Webcams today is showing a pair of the old blue and red 3D glasses on top of what looks like a box for Super Marathon, a port of Bungie's Mac shooter to the ill-fated Bandai console, the Pippin@Home. The Marathon Story page has archived an old ad for the game from Cyberian Outpost.
Super Marathon was a port of Marathon 1 and 2; it ran only on the Pippin, although a mysterious extension for the Mac OS should have enabled it to run on Mac computers as well; more information on Super Marathon can be found in the 1998 archives of the Marathon Story Page. Matt Soell, now of Wideload, mentions there that nobody had many copies of Super Marathon; it looks as if at least one has surfaced somewhere at Bungie.
The Marathon Map Makers Guild has released version 3.0b7 (remember the b stands for beta) of Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, or EMR for short. This is a third party scenario for Bungie's Marathon games, and has been updated to work with the latest enhanced open-source version of the Marathon engine, Aleph One.
...the lazy do news roundups. Here's what didn't quite manage to slip past us in the past few days, hours, or even weeks:
If you can read that headline and not hear Billy Ocean... then good for you.
The Marathon Trilogy Release site at Bungie.org has added .zip files especially for Windows users who want to play Marathon 2 or Marathon Infinity using the Aleph One engine on their PCs. To play Marthon 1 using Aleph One, you need to get the M1A1 scenario conversion by Raul Bonilla.
New Bungie fans who wanted to experience Bungie's earlier science fiction shooter classic, Marathon, up until now were out of luck. The vast majority of stores simply didn't have it for sale, and only a few copies turned up now and then on Ebay. And although a marvelous new project, Aleph One, would allow the game to run on modern operating systems, you still needed the data files from a retail copy of the game to make them work, and only the files from Marathon 1 were available online, in the form of the M1A1 scenario download.
Now, Bungie has officially sanctioned the free (as in beer, not speech) release of the entire Marathon Trilogy, and Bungie.org is hosting the files. So far only the Mac versions are up, but a method for creating files that Windows users can use with their copies of Aleph One is being developed. Go to the site to get the files, or just read the FAQ. The Aleph One page today also notes that the Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity files from the Trilogy Release site are fully compatible with Aleph One; and if there's another Marathon file or scenario you want to see online, you can email them at trilogyrelease@bungie.org.
Mjolnir Mark IV has submitted the Marathon's tenth anniversary to the games section of Slashdot, with links to the Marathon Story Page, the Halo Story Page's area on Marathon connections, and Aleph One. So if any of those sites go down today... you'll know why.
As further celebration of Marathon's tenth anniversary, James Willson has added code to Aleph One enabling users behind NAT firewalls to join TCP/IP network games. Test Windows and Mac versions are being hosted by Gregory Smith.
Forrest Cameranesi has released the "penultimate version" of the long-in-production scenario Eternal, an unofficial sequel to Marathon Infinity. (What's next, Duke Nukem Forever? --Ed.)
Between Marathon's tenth anniversary and this Christmas thing coming up, there's lots to do, necessitating Yet Another News Roundup:
Anton P Nym pointed out on our news page yesterday that Reiginko has announced a contest; participants will be asked to contribute an essay, polem, or joke and top winners in each category will receive a complete, signed set of Marathon disks.
[image:8947 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] December 21, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Marathon, the first in a series of three science fiction first person shooters published by Bungie in the 1990s. The games were primarily made for the Macintosh platform, despite a port of Marathon 2: Durandal for Windows and the ill-fated Super Marathon port for the even more ill-fated Mac-based console by Bandai called the Pippin. Bungie also published Marathon Infinity, a scenario by Double Aught that used the Marathon 2 engine to continue the story of the nameless security guard protagonist. Later the Marathon 2 engine's source code was opened, paving the way for the development of the Aleph One project, which has ported the engine to modern operating systems including OS X, Linux, and Windows, allowing users to play the full series of games using current hardware. The History of Bungie, part of the Icons series run by G4TechTV, features a bit on Marathon, the game that gave Bungie its reputation among Mac gamers and Mac users and is, in many ways, the progenitor of and inspiration for Halo and Halo 2. HBO is making this show available for download now that it is off G4TechTV's broadcast schedule.
If you've never played the games, check them out, either by playing Aleph One or just by reading the excellent and compendious Marathon Story Page maintained by Hamish Sinclair.
If you're already a Marathon fan and want to find a unique way to celebrate this occasion, check out the Marathon anniversary wallpaper done by Jay "Anaphiel" Faircloth, who has also done digital artwork for M1A1, the conversion of the Marathon 1 scenario for the Aleph One engine, and Marathon: Resurrection, a Marathon-themed mod for the Unreal engine, as well as other Marathon wallpapers.
UPDATE: Anaphiel has updated his site with a broader selection of designs and sizes of his Marathon Anniversary Desktop.
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh.
I have been called a hundred names and will be called a
thousand more before the world goes dim and cold.
I am hero. She has been nameless since our birth,
a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin,
a sword drenched in my blood forever, my greatest and
only love. She is the dark one, the enemy and lover, without
whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar!
Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world
1Up has a Bungie retrospective up, covering in detail Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon trilogy, and Halo 1, with a tip of the hat to earlier games as well. Interestingly, the Bungie-published but not developed side-scroller Abuse gets a mention, while the numerous Marathon licensees and the unmentionable Weekend Warrior do not. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.