Retronauts 3: Marathon, the UnHalo
Rumor has it that Bungie is mulling the possibility of a Marathon revival. Fact has it that Bungie is being typically evasive and non-commital about the issue, which means absolutely nothing.
Personally, I would be pretty OK with them not reviving the series. Marathon was brilliant in its time and I still love the trilogy, but I don't think they could modernize the whole thing without sacrificing much of what made it so great. Marathon -- despite its apparent connections to Halo -- is a very different creature from Bungie's current work, and I think a little part of my heart would wither and crumble away into dust if they turned it into a glossy Hollywood-friendly Halo-alike.
Marathon [ Macintosh | 1994 ]
See, what made Marathon so interesting is that it was a story-driven game... in which the story was pretty much optional. Rather than unfolding via cutscenes and conversations, Marathon's plot was conveyed by a series of computer terminals in which you'd receive information and instructions from your AI assistant (or, later in the game, your deranged AI controller). Other terminals offered tangential information, tidbits of backstory or schematics or even snippets of conversations between other parties.
But since the goal of the gameplay was simply to blow the crap out of stuff, you could also just skim past the text, look at the maps to see where you needed to go and blunder your way through the game without forcing your poor overheated brain to break a sweat. Marathon didn't force its story on you, but if you took the time to pay attention you discovered it was actually pretty good.
The basic premise of the game was that you were a security officer for the U.S.S. Marathon (a colony ship loaded with settlers in transit to a new world), tasked with the impossible mission of singlehandedly thwarting an alien takeover of the ship. Complicating matters was the fact that the Marathon was run by three AIs, one of whom -- Durandal -- became rampant (self-aware; see also: Cortana) and decided to interfere with your actions. Durandal wasn't evil, though; he was simply more interested in exploring his new sentience and learning about the enemy than he was in protecting the settlers. In the process, he discovered that the floaty red alien cyborgs in the pic above, the Compilers, were actually a slave race under the control of the main invaders; once he began interfering in the action, the game's mission became a simultaneous race to save Marathon's humans and free the Compilers.
The final stages, in which the Compilers revolted against their masters and did much of your dirty work for you (i.e. smashing the slavers into smeary grey bugpaste), were exquisitely satisfying.
Besides the general plot, Marathon's terminal data also provided more comprehensive information -- most intriguingly, hints about the player character's past and the distinct possibility that he was a cyborg secretly placed aboard the ship to further the ends of certain political factions. Although he was never actually given a name, the "cyborg" was kind of like Master Chief, except more awesome. For starters, he could carry more than two weapons at a time, and he didn't have a voice inside his skull nagging him during contemplative moments.
Of course, stories are all well and good -- and certainly Marathon's has given rise to some impressive forms of obsession -- but it was the gameplay that kept so many people glued to their keyboards when it first came out. The plot geekery came later; at the beginning, it was all about sweet, sweet destruction.
The Marathon series still has some of the finest FPS level designs I've ever experienced. It's the maps that make the game feel so wildly different from Halo, in fact; where the Halo games rely on linear corridors to keep the pace brisk (and copy-and-paste repetition to pad the experience), Marathon had much more open levels. More intricate, too. There was a moderate amount of switch-throwing and a few annoying elevator puzzles, but for the most part the levels were large and free and progress was mainly a matter of figuring out where to go and how to kill all the bad guys in the way.
Marathon also possessed an uncanny sense of isolation -- if you elected to turn off the music (and most people did), the game was largely silent but for the chirps and howls of enemies and the blissful sounds of heavy ordinance. It was much slower-paced than its competition (read: Doom, Dark Forces), and focused more on precision and exploration than the blistering action of other shooters. Occasional forays beyond the boundaries of the ship punctuated the adventure, including a few eye-searing trips to the slaver's craft and a trip to the vacuum-exposed surface of the colony to activate a communications relay.
If any of this sounds a bit like Metroid Prime, well, yeah. Pretty much.
Marathon was far from perfect, though; its graphic engine was pretty primitive, a 2.5D affair created long before Quake. The game's ability to render non-orthagonal spaces made possible the most complex levels of its time, but the tradeoff was that it was slow-moving and kind of ugly. The graphics had a very curious hand-drawn look to them at times, with higher resolution sprites than Doom's that looked all the more awkward for their extra detail.
It's also sort of strange just how much attention was paid to creating an intriguing story and how little effort was put into creating levels that actually made sense. Why were there no living spaces? Who would design corridors that could only be accessed by taking a running jump from a high ledge over a bit of magma? For that matter, why were there vast, open pits of magma in the middle of a colony ship to begin with? Granted, the Marathon was actually one of Mars' moons hollowed out (Deimos, I think), but my vestigial science learnin' tells me that oversized asteroids don't have molten cores.
And it probably goes without saying that the AI was pretty bad -- most enemies' idea of "tactics" was to run straight at you while shooting. The weapons were great, though, offering a nice balance of offenses and secondary functions. The Marathon dude was dual-wielding way before Master Chief got around to it, and he had a totally sweet combination machine gun/grenade launcher, too.
Still, while Marathon's sequels were actually quite a lot better technically and logically, I have a soft spot for the original. The aliens' weird chirping sound still makes me jump, and I always smirk a little whenever I see a Marathon concept show up in Halo. Like the Sentinel Majors, which are basically just Juggernauts (see above) minus the tiny little angry face.
Hmm, I have to admit, the prospect of a remake is a little tempting. If they could make this:
look like this:
I just might go for it. Possibly. Now, a Pathways Into Darkness remake? I'd be all over that.
P.S. Seven seven seven seven seven seven seven. Right, I think that about covers it.
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