Marathon: Children of Doom Episode 4
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- Going into this series I had never played Marathon, so let's take a look at it together!
Aleph One ports of Marathon, Durandal, and Infinity: alephone.lhowo...
Also, for the love of god, please let us not get into a debate about how to pronounce "Durandal."
Support the show! / errantsignal
Watch me make regretful statements in real time! / campster
My takeaway on Bungie and their purple/ general neon fixation was simply that most modern military forces the world over use earth tones, and so therefore to establish a sense of 'other-ness', the aliens should be using the exact opposite.
I heard purple was just Bungie-founder Jason Jones favorite color :) I think it's mentioned in the Halo developer commentary.
Are we citing Razbuten’s video about purple? ;)
Ok, but what about Konoko and Muro having purple hair, and all the enemies also being color-coded in your typical Bungie style? Is it supposed to hint at the "other-ness" of the two siblings?
Btw, what was purple in Myth 1&2? Can't remember
@@Medytacjusz Soulless?
An interesting fact is that Jason Jones, the co-founder of Bungie, is still working at the company to this day. He's had significant foundational creative input on every new game they make but often takes a step back for the sequels. He's a kind of creative through line through every new series they have made, which is why, despite having a new art, gameplay, music and story team they manage to keep so much thematic consistency. Just wait until you see pathways into Darkness/Marathon Infinity and the parallels between that story and the pyramid under the moon in Destiny.
Didn't he quit after halo 2?
@@tss1473 Nope, he basically just disappeared for a while until coming back to work on Destiny in 2008
I never played Marathon as a kid, but finding my way to that Marathon's Story blog in the late 90s and reading through it is one of my most intensely nostalgic childhood memories. It's such a dark, mysterious thing, amplified by the fact that I was a step removed from the game itself. Even today I still haven't gone and played more than part of the first game because I don't know if I want to replace my fragmented, dreamlike memory of the story with something concrete.
The games themselves are fragmented and dreamlike, so you might not be disappointed.
@@jabberw0k812
This is really making me think of when I stumbled upon the Ultranomicon and, still never having played Star Control 2, falling in love with the weird story and worldbuilding of that game
What a beautiful comment.
That exact type of experience is what Dark Souls was created to mimic
You said the combat was kind of basic (and I concede the point through our current lens), but as a teenager at the time it came out the weapons were amazing. Dual weilding, secondary or alternate fire modes, charge ups, different weapons working better against different foes, and most importantly of all: momentum based damage for punching like a true vidmaster. Also the multiplayer in M2 and M Infinity was fantastic, featuring a variety of play modes like King of the Hill, Team Deathmatch, Kill the Man With The Ball, and Tag. The map editor made it so you could bang out a multiplayer map inside of 2-3 hours that would entertain friends for ages. It was a major taste for what game development was like for us Mac geeks, and some of us are in the industry today because of it.
It was also amazing in 1994 because the physics allowed for “grenade jumping” and it actually mattered to your aim if you looked up or down. Unlike Doom, Marathon was one of the first FPS to make use of a mouse’s freedom of looking.
As a person born in the 90s I feel like I'm discovering some Lovecraftian precursor to the Bible when I learn about these old games. It's like finding baby pictures of an older brother I never knew I had who is just like me. Marathon isn't just like the Halo I grew up with, it IS Halo. In 100 years when people have been plugging themselves into VR games for the past 50 years and some character AI does go rogue on some space colony those people are going to be asking why they didn't see it coming. I'll be too dead to tell them why they should have.
7:17 I'm surprised that this segment discusses how Marathon's exposition 'would be done today' without talking more about how Bungie's exposition *is* done today, in Destiny - which is pretty much the exact same way they did it then, ie with metric tons of just straight up text.
Except almost none of it concerns the player directly and can be ignored without missing any vital information
Yeah destiny has some issues with its plot delivery, and some inconsistency with the intentions of its game design : [
Also Bungie had already gone back to marathon-style story presentation in the hidden Big Lore bits of Halo 3 and Reach, and as more of a main throughline in ODST.
I'm also surprised that the example of how Marathon's exposition "would be done today" showcases a game that's old enough to get a driver's license in every U.S. state :P
@Celeste This is true. Someone who's better at this than I am should write an essay on the sort-of-patronizing way that Destiny manages to superficially coddle you as The Greatest And Coolest Guardian Ever Whom Everybody Loves And Is Also Super Funny And Has Great Hair - while at the same time on every other level including the basic structure of the game you're basically a glorified extra or at best an understudy for the real plot that's happening seemingly everywhere except where you are.
Except it’s delivered in a worse manner and is ignored except by the Destiny lore you tubers.
Wow, it's pretty awesome you mentioned the Marathon's Story community. That was my whole universe back in the day. I actually went to some meet ups with them and met the site's administrator, Hamish Sinclair.
I just want to note that the combat is a lot more nuanced than it may first appear to casual players. When you play on Total Carnage skill, it's a whole other ballgame, it becomes a strategic dance around fast and frequent projectiles like a bullet hell game, and you have to manage your ammo and strategically know when to reload (since you're vulnerable the entire duration there). Added to that is the fact that it's one of the earliest FPSes to use pathfinding nodes and not just wander directly into the player's general direction, and many combat scenarios can play out differently depending on where you entered a room from (in the more open-ended levels, anyhow).
I like having a sci-fi novella within my shooty games.
Still shorter than Destiny's massive tome.
@@KiraSlith I mean, when you have a big team, that helps.
I also kinda prefer a more consistent, concise narrative rather than tomes of flavor text.
Durandal remastered when, Bungie?
@@KiraSlith Gosh I wish Destiny just interspersed their lore inside the actual game, instead of under layers of shell interfaces and metalayers of social media. The mazelike marathon-like level design in Destiny's patrol zones suggests to me that lore terminals might have been intended at some point in preproduction.
@@Chronosol I'm not exactly sure I want Bungie touching Marathon, worry they'll screw it up and simplify the great story in the process.
@@Chronosol It was remastered, for Xbox Live Arcade. That version, with the redone HD assets, is what you can download at alephone.lhowon.org/
Even elements like the aliens being slaves you free to fight their oppressors (engineers in ODST) get recycled into Halo, not to mention cyborgs and AI. I needa give this a try
And all of the same elements amd references are there in Destiny too, even if they never meaningfully come together. Bungie had this FPS monomyth thing that they kept reiterating, before the core Bungie team disintegrated at least. They clearly allude to that monomyth thing at some point in each of these games, too.
Edit: this is mentioned in the video, I've noticed. I am irrelevant now.
Vortigaunts in Half-Life too
Ahhh, my two iconic childhood FPS franchises: Marathon and Descent! You did M1 justice here. So much to appreciate.
What a really great overview of Marathon from someone new to the game- great job! I do wish you would have talked about the multiplayer play- it was really revolutionary at the time because not many personal computers of the day had affordable networking like the Mac did with LocalTalk. It was so much fun and the stereo sound effects really helped you identify where threats were coming from much like today's shooters.
They do get their own icons in Marathon: Durandal, to differentiate between various AIs, but there is still opportunities for an AI to impersonate another.
*1:* It ain't a sprint: it's a Marathon!
*2:* Yup. Halo's DNA runs thick and rich through Marathon. It's all there, just as a bridging point between Doom and System Shock.
*3:* "Love and kisses, Durandal." What a joker indeed...
*4:* ...now that's a new wrinkle. To me, Half-Life came about as a cross-breeding of Quake's full-3D tech and Duke3D's strong interactivity, but I guess it also owes its existence to Marathon in terms of the story-driven shooter aspect.
Oh hey, it's that guy from Helloween4545's comments. Never knew you were a Marathon fan.
@@TOASTEngineer I'm a lover of retro shooters in general. Though in all honesty, the Marathon trilogy passed me by since I was a PC exclusive, but I can definitely see its virtues.
One of those being the use of a machine-gun with grenade-launcher alt-fire. TBH, that particular weapon is one of the go-to concepts for a weapon that has an alt-fire. It was pretty common in the Half-Life games, in OG Painkiller, and a lot of modern-military shooters too. Never thought I'd see it in Marathon, tho.
Granted, the combo is kind of plain-toast vanilla missionary, not being the most imaginative of alt-firing weapons to put in your shooter, but it's a combination that works.
I'm not sure how much of Marathon's DNA can be seen in Half-Life when I really think about it. Story driven shooters weren't really anything new by 1998. It was more how Half-Life told its story through gameplay that made it stand out. You can argue Marathon has some of that but the levels are kind of dodgy and most of its story was told through text which is something Half-Life strived to avoid. So if it owes anything to Marathon it's that it took great pains to not be like Marathon in that sense, or like Bethesda's Terminator games or Jedi Knight which again, had some in gameplay stuff going on but still broke things up with traditional levels and cutscenes.
I think your observation of Quake's technology and Duke's sense of place and interactivity feel more like stepping stones to Half-Life than Marathon does, not to slight Marathon because it certainly did a great job of bringing the depth of something like System Shock's plot to a more action-oriented FPS and it was clearly influential in both subtle and obvious ways (like Halo of course).
When someone does make that video about Bungie's overarching theme, they'll call it "How to Play the Bungie Chord"
Marathon and Marathon 2 were an absolute core part of my childhood. But NOBODY ELSE on the playground had Macs so I felt so alone and so flustered trying to tell everyone how amazing they were.
That was me too! I was able to convert a few of my closest friends. But most people I know just stuck with Doom.
You should really give Durandal and Infinity a shot, even if you don't do a video on them. The level design and gameplay were greatly improved. Some great verticality for early FPSes.
This series will eventually just cover the entire FPS genre, one game at a time.
Can't wait for the Fallout 76 episode in 2050 when the new new coronavirus pandemic hits! /s
@@tukkek I miss Ahoy's YT series, this one gonna be a fine replacement :)
@Siledas fine with me. i'm loving these.
If you think Marathon was ahead of its time, you should try Pathways into Darkness, Bungie's previous offering.
Just don't go into it expecting Wolfenstein 3D, it has action but nothing like Marathon or late FPS. It's also very cryptic and difficult to finish without a guide/hint book.
Again a really good episode. Solid work, Campster!
I hope you cover the most important FPS game of 1995 next time. That being, of course, William Shatner's TekWar.
I grew up with old Bungie games, back when they were a relatively small indie developer. Marathon and Myth: the Fallen Lords were milestones for rich, compelling, immersive stories on top of good old fun gameplay. They really opened my eyes about the possibilities of storytelling in games, and in that respect they were really ahead of their time. It feels like a lot of cult classic games from this era would likely be written off as too cerebral by other, more established developers (like id).
Don't forget Pathways into Darkness.
Funnily enough, a common criticism of Destiny's story (or rather various plots) is that most of it's told through plain text, which wasn't even available in-game until D2's first major expansion. Some characters are still only literary, and most of them we probably won't ever meet in person. On the other hand, it allows for some pretty unrestrained exploration of concepts not usually seen in military sci-fi games and I'm kinda bummed that nobody does literary analysis of those. Those in the community interested in lore devote all their time to superficial "explanations" and retreads of already told stories. I kinda get that parts of Destiny's lore need some piecing together, but isn't the fun in doing it yourself?
Dude, I just want to take a moment to tell you how amazing I find your work. The content you create is both enriching and thoroughly entertaining for me. This series in particular I find mind-blowing. Im a third wold country freencer, so is kind of hard for me to support you through patreon, but I hope I can do it in a not to distant future, because I really appreciate what you do. Anyways , greetings from Colombia, I wish you are able to keep up the great job and I hope you are proud of what you do, you really should be.
Funding or no, I’m sure comments like this mean the world to an author. Best of luck in Colombia.
I have to admit, when you announced that you were going to branch out from traditional Errant Signal episodes and do some other things, I was disappointed there wouldn't be more Errant Signal episodes and worried that the new stuff wouldn't be as good. But I'm really enjoying Children of Doom and Blips so far! Of course, I'm also glad that Errant Signal didn't go away completely.
"Nor have I played Durandal or Infinity" AAARGGHHH you picked the only one I've never really liked out of the three!
He chose.....poorly
@@Chronosol I believe I was told by my Mac lovin friend that 'you should skip 1, its the worst because it has like escort missions and poor level design' and I was like 'BUT THE STORY' and he smashed a link to an ancient text page at me. I think it was aleph's thing? Truly that saved me so much time and frustration... Plus I don't even think this game has those bad ass shotguns that durandal does
Still important though lol
zajajaja I think it’s still an enjoyable game. The atmosphere is pretty great, in part due to the soundtrack. It has some shit mission but overall it’s fun.
Im in the process of playing through the game that i had to pause due to RL and Epic store gifting me Civ6 hehe, but honestly it isnt bad at all, there are some hiccups but they are that - hiccups. A little frustration then back to fun
I thought the title of this series was a play on Children of Dune. I'm glad I have that confirmation. Just don't hand the series off to your son after the 6th episode and have him write bad fan fiction supposedly based on "notes that were found".
Also, great episode as always! Can't wait for the next one!
This series and channel are hopelessly under-viewed. Thank you for your effort on this amazing series, I’ve watched through at least 3 times.
Great job, dude. I know this comment will go unnoticed, but I can't understate how guys like you, Mandalore and Super Bunnyhop are contributing to videogame journalism and critique by highlighting this kind of titles and issues. I love your content, man, for real.
The longer the Icon of Childhood Nostalgia is on Earth, the more powerful it gets.
Really interesting to hear this take on this game series which was an childhood obsession of mine. Marathon to me is auteur-gaming, The mac gaming scene of the 90's seemed to position itself in opposition to the crude and childish poster games of of the Windows and console market and found a niche audience in the strange and small community of mac owners back then mostly consisting of creative professionals and hippie-types. Quite different to the modern Apple-crowd.
Totes. My family subscribed to MacAddict magazine and, in the days before fast internet and streaming/downloadable content, getting their demo disc in the mail felt like Christmas once a month. The Mac indie scene was so solid but comparatively obscure, and felt like a cool underground in the pre-Steam, pre-cross platforming era.
An aspect of Marathon that is often overlooked is how advanced and innovative it's multiplayer was for the time. It had a plethora of unique game modes and even supported co-op campaign play.
All for the incredibly small subset of people which had access to several fast macs on a local network. In places like publishing offices and the like it was incredible though.
We still play :)
Kill the man with the ball...
@MEME GOD How so? Also that was almost two years later.
I was thinking about the whole "implied you're a soldier cyborg" thing and the accusations of ultra violence from the game and I actually found it more clever than most games that try to shame you for being violent
Because a lot of games try to shame you for being needlessly violent without always giving the player a choice, they make you be violent and then blame the player
Others succeed by making violent actually optional and the shame they make players feel is especially earned if the player didn't even think about whether there even was a nonviolent solution
But marathon seems to avoid this by shaming the character and not the player, if you're playing as someone designed for violence you loose the impact that shaming the player directly might have, but in exchange you put the weight of that violence on a character that didn't have a choice and that hopefully the player can empathize with just by having played as that character for the entire game
It's a notably different way of looking at the player character from the usual that's almost nothing more than a vessel for the player, in a way it reminds me of the game depression quest where the lack of choice was an important narrative tool (even if in marathon's case it was probably less of a narrative decision than the technological constraints)
It's always refreshing to see Marathon related content on youtube. For all its faults, the Marathon series contributes something very special to the medium when it comes to narrative. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the unique way in which all the elements of the game work with one another leave the player with a sense of wonder and fulfillment similar to the one you get when finishing a great sci-fi novel. The quality of the writing might not be quite there but its ambition, atmosphere and scope sure make up for it!
The fully text based characters remind me a lot of The Talos Principle. AI you meet in that story don't really have an avatar either.
Was going to post this if you hadn't!
Marathon is such an intriguingly obscure little thing, always love to hear about it
Explaining the lore to this series to my friends is like listening to a raving schizophrenic. Its fucking great.
Interesting how you can hear riffs of what would become Halo soundtracks in Marathon, even though the game predates Marty O'Donnell joining Bungie.
John Cole I consider Marathon to be a prequel to Halo despite what anyone else says haha
Josh Spradley
Thematically it’s a prequel; but has absolutely no narrative relationship to Halo.
@@ninboy01 LALALALALAALALAAAA I CANT HEAR YOU 🤣
@@JSpradley123 the Pillar of Autumn has the USEC Marathon logo on its side 😉
Oh man, you didn't play Marathon 2? Durandal has my favorite FPS story of all time. It's arguably one of my favorite sci-fi novels.
I wonder if Half-Life actually was inspired by Marathon or if it's an example of Convergent Evolution. This is basically when people with similar issues come up with similar solutions expressly because those are just good ways of dealing with said issue. Think about this, Halo is often touted as the game that made first-person shooter controls viable on consoles. But in 2000, the same year the PS2 came out, Alien Resurrection came out with that exact same control scheme. There are reviews lambasting it for not using the standard first-person controllers of the day. That is moving forward and backward, and turning left and right with the d-pad and strafing with the shoulder buttons.
That game was a licensed movie game, notoriously bad genre, released right as it's console was being overshadowed by the next generation so it would be a stretch to say that it ultimately influenced later games.
Halo might have been Convergent Evolution (the timeline of a thirteen MONTH divide between the two makes sense for it to have been), it might not have been. People at Bungie might have played Alien: Resurrection on an E3 show floor and said "THAT. Make THAT, but better, and we've cracked the console FPS."
Half-Life, though? Doubtful. There's, pretty much, four YEARS (if you want to be SUPER technical, 47 months) between the first Marathon and the first Half-Life. They've never explicitly mentioned Marathon as an influence, but the fact that they say they want the game to "scare you like Doom did" even though...Doom wasn't EVER a scary game until well after Half-Life came out? A bloodthirsty game, yes. A power fantasy game, yes. A METAL game, yes. But not "scary." It seems shifty, like they're leaving out a key influence or two.
Either way, Marathon was certainly ahead of its time.
Half-Life always seemed to me like it was constantly homaging Doom more than anything else, but it's true that Marathon is less famous, and I never played much of either Doom or Marathon myself.
Half-Life does of course tell a story, but it's not a very detailed or complicated story, and narrative definitely isn't the game's primary focus.
The main emphasis is on the basic Wolfenstein/Doom formula of "win a big frenetic setpiece fight, then solve a maze or puzzle to get to the next big frenetic setpiece fight".
(HL2 was a big change from Hl1 in this respect. In HL1 barely any of the NPC's even have names, and most of them aren't really characters in the story so much as puzzle-solving mechanics, e.g. "escort this scientist through a gauntlet of enemies so he can open a door for you" or "here's two NPC's talking to each other for a second to give you a hint about what you're supposed to do next". There's very little actual plot exposition--basically just "you're stuck in this giant building full of weird sci-fi shit, and if you don't escape from it you're going to die", right up until the end, and even in the final section on Xen your motivation is literally just "you have to go to the aliens' dimension and kill their leader because if you don't, there won't be anything left back here to come home to.")
What I remember from 1998 is that nobody was really talking about Half-Life's story at all. People were mostly excited about the physics engine, and the creative puzzles and fights the developers came up with to use it.
The play mechanics were very innovative for the time. The story and narrative techniques really weren't.
("Black Mesa" is "Area 51" in all but name, and "the government knows about aliens but is conspiring to keep it a secret" was the most ubiquitous and generic stock trope in all of 90's science fiction in any medium. And "escape from a creepy science lab during an alien invasion" is exactly the same story structure as Doom, and lots of other games copied it.)
Downloaded Aleph One after watching this video, and I'm loving Marathon, I'm even playing with the classic HUD.
Blind Pumpkin How do you turn it on?
@@PiroKUSS In the preferences you can mess with the hud options, turn off addons/mods etc
As someone who is also on that weird spot of kinda getting and understanding the importance of Marathon, while never actually played it, this video is utterly fascinating. Good stuff!
The only reason I don't think System Shock and/or Marathon have the love the id series does I think is largely due to being on Mac and never coming to PC until much later. It's not a matter of their quality, but more of a matter of exposure.
Thank you for making this series! I never grew up on any of these games so I have no nostalgia or want to play any of them. But it's a joy to listen to you talk about them!
Marathon was my jam when I was a kid. We had a Mac IIsi, which was leaps and bounds above the old Mac Classics I saw other people using, but was just at the cusp of struggling with newer and more demanding titles in 1994. Unfortunately, it also meant that most of the awesome stuff about Doom I couldn't play since it simply wasn't available to me. But then here comes Bungie, moving in to fill that gap and do it with such enthusiasm and style. Finally here was an FPS I could play, and not just a token effort either, but something that really moved the genre forward. Admittedly it ran poorly on my machine, with me having to turn down all the graphics as low as possible just to run at ten frames per second on my old twenty megahertz processor, but it could still run and with patient play I could still beat it. The next several years were spent perusing Marathon's Story as a way to engage with the game far beyond what the developers ever expected or intended.
(Incidentally, years later I got to work under Jason Jones, who coded Marathon's renderer in Assembly. The world can be a small place at times.)
"he promises he didn't give them any grenades" [cut to the drones very much not grenadeless] "he... lied." made me laugh out loud. perfect delivery.
Marathon through infinity and Aleph One were my childhood. Absolutely loved it. Great video!
Really excellent video as always Chris. Thank you so much for shedding some light on a very important game that I was (largely) unaware of prior to this video. I've always really admired your writer's voice and analytical approach!
This was fascinating, probably your best video in this series yet! I learned so much and your discussion of marathon was fascinating, well done :)
I'm not even a big FPS person these days, but this series has been so absolutely fascinating. I can't wait for the next one!
One thing I vividly remember about Marathon which made it stand out, and I can't remember if it was the original, or the sequel that had it, was ambient sound. The engine had point sources for sound, so you could tell if a Bob was yelling at you from the left corridor or the right, or hear the near miss as an anti-tank missile flew past you. Or find that elevator or door that was moving that you didn't spot the first time by because the entrance was bathed in shadow.
I think it even took notice of how many walls were between you and the sound, so you would barely hear an alien if they were patrolling on the other side of a door, chattering to their buddies. That broke down a bit when hallways intersected in 4D space, making you think an alien was right next to you when they were a floor above. But it definitely made wearing headphones a whole new experience compared to other games on the Mac at the time.
I love marathon. Not enough people talk about this game. Thanks for making this!
I watched my dad playing this when I was a kid. I knew about the fusion pistol overcharge self destruct. When playing Halo later, for the first time (doing co-op on my friends Xbox), I instinctively held down the trigger as long as possible, hoping to blow myself up. I didn't even know who Bungie was (that I recall) and it wasn't until probably Halo 3 that I was fully aware after making my bungie profile for the forge and theater clips.
Such a throwback. I played this game so long ago i barely remembered it. This is lumped in with a blur of memories of early macintosh gaming, along with Myst and Escape Velocity. I should revisit this one day, i never did get very far into it as a 7 year old with no one else in the family explaining video game logic or traditions to me.
Blake Stone, from 1993 (released literally the same week as Doom), is Wolf-3D based but had some cool health stations like you see at 12:20. It also had interactive NPCs that could help you, and it was possible to go back to previous floors within an episode. It was kind of ahead of its time, but the tech held it back. It would be interesting to see a video on more obscure shooters like that.
Marathon deserves a reboot equivalent to Dooms, like honestly.
The best thing about Marathon was the amazing multiplayer options that no other game at that time had.
Nice catch with that Half-Life comparison! I don't think I've heard that from anyone else. The Marathon trilogy was truly visionary in its storytelling but also multiplayer. You mentioned "the Bungie formula" and it's just as evident on the multiplayer side. Some game modes were carried over to Halo, Halo's Theater mode was an evolution of Marathon's Films, and most importantly the multiplayer design was centered around having fun with your friends, essentially giving you a sandbox to mess around in.
Fantastic video, and I hope you find the time to play Marathon 2 and Infinity; these games have some magic that I don't see widely understood, and you've done an excellent job of explaining why Marathon holds that special place in many people's hearts. I was a Marathon kid for a long time because Doom (II, specifically) didn't come out on MacOS until years after the Marathon games.
Presumably you already know this, but both Marathon 2 and Infinity much more so did non-linear FPS storytelling in ways that were arguably decades ahead of their time. Bungie giving players Forge was revolutionary at the time as well - tools existed to mod and map makes (Phforte and some other ones), but to get the actual STUDIO tools for content making had never been done.
That opening to this video is a perfect way to introduce a classic Bungie game lmao, as well as a nice reference to two important predecessors
I had the demo of marathon on a disc for my old family mac. I played it too death. that first level. and after a while I got a copy of marathon 2 installed, probably gotten illegaly through an uncle or something. these games were so close to my heart. (I'm non english native so some of the story was more than a little vague, but I got the gist of it).
years later I remember starting half life for the first time and being like "oh hey this is like marathon", cool !
thanks for the video. it's been a great series so far. looking forward to the next one :)
My parents had an Apple Mac, so the Marathon series were some of my favourite games when I was a kid. The Mac did get ports of Doom and Doom 2, but Marathon always felt distinct from them- it had much more of a story and the gameplay had more depth, even if the monsters seemed a little lame compared to Doom's. It had several features that are FPS genre staples that I don't think existed before it came along- e.g. weapons with alternate fire modes and friendly and neutral NPC's. Also Bungie bundled the second sequel, Marathon Infinity with easy-to-use level and physics editors, so even though it never had the same level of popularity as Doom, it had a very active community producing new content for it for several years afterwards.
Bungie actually made one FPS before Marathon- Pathways Into Darkness, which was similar to Wolfenstein 3D on a technical level, but as with Doom vs Marathon added a lot more depth to the gameplay and was just plain weirder. Some of the monster designs for that game were truly bizarre
My most favorite link between Marathon and Halo is that the plasma pistol in Halo is virtually identical to the fusion piston in Marathon (and in Bungie's dev tools for Marathon, which were called Anvil and Forge, that gun is referred to as the plasma pistol).
Regarding those dev tools, I remember having a lot of fun with Anvil, though a lot less with Forge just because I couldn't get it to work nearly as well. Anvil let you alter the physics and rules of the environment. My favorite cheaty trick was to make it so gravity didn't affect you if you were running.
Marathon's map editor was pretty cool, though. The game actually supported two rooms being in the same physical space without interacting if you did it right, and there was even a multiplayer map that took advantage of that.
Wanna feel old? The phrase "Mac-exclusive video game" is a phrase I had never heard and never thought I would hear until now, and I'm old enough to drink.
Look up Ambrosia software, they made some of the best Mac games of the era. There was a small and rabid audience for Mac games. Bungie itself had several other ‘major shooters’ before Marathon, Mac exclusive of course. Back then there were no cross platform engines so only a few teams like Blizzard could support Mac and DOS/win equally.
The Mac had a really vibrant shareware scene back in the day, and a few little "pro" devs like Bungie making Mac-only or Mac-first stuff. It was a fun time: a lot of experimentation, a lot of unique games that wouldn't really fit in to the broader PC scene getting embraced by Mac gamers because it was what we had.
It's cool to see just how foundational Marathon is. I too as a PC user, never played any of them. Another fantastic episode!
I played Doom a little back in the day and was wowed by the idea of a game played in first person perspective (and still love those games today), but there wasn't much appeal for me beyond that novelty. I got Marathon 2 for my first Mac, and was blown away by comparison - it was much more colorful, it was much weirder (seriously, the entire series just gets increasingly stranger), it had an actual story, and you could dual-wield weapons that had alternate firing modes...it just felt like an immediate evolution on what Doom was doing. And as someone who plays entirely too much Destiny, it's great to see all of the thematic lines drawn from Marathon through Halo to Destiny. Seriously, check out 2 and Infinity at some point - the mechanics don't really change, but oh boy, the narrative...
Thank you for making this. Too few people know about the Marathon games and their influence.
Loved Marathon. My cousin and I used to play it across a LAN and made up cooperative play. There was one map where enemies would spawn around the death match, we'd not attack each other and just keep attacking the spawning waves of enemies. This was way before other cooperative FPS games existed and I realized the huge potential for it... shame I was only a kid at the time.
Huh, an early wave based survival mode?
Thanks for covering this one. I’ll add to the others- there is a direct line in the multiplayer from Marathon to Myth to Halo. It’s the reason Halo2 had ground breaking multiplayer on Xbox. The bones of all of Halo’s most popular modes were in both Marathon and Myth. And Myth is another one of these hugely overlooked games. Thanks again. See ya starside.
It may surprise you that I like Marathon. Honestly I think the whole Mac cannon, especially what Bungie was doing pre-Halo, is unfortunately ignored by most people because everyone played Windows or on consoles. Marathon and its sequels were great for their time (honestly, I didn't play it until ~2006 because I didn't have anything but a Mac), but so was Myth, Pathways into Darkness, Escape Velocity, and Myst before it was ported (if that counts). Obviously many of these were of their time; Halo 1 did much of what I loved about Marathon but honestly better, except maybe the story.
If I were to gush about one other Mac games that deserve more attention it would be Escape Velocity NOVA. I've seen very slight mentions of it from Austin Walker or Mark Brown, but the game is super interesting in its approach to making a galaxy feel like a living place. It has a number of factions with different associations and alliances with one another, all of whom you have to play in the space of. Want to work with the rebels against the Federation? Well one of the rival governments the Polaris will start to like you more as they are supporting the uprising. But you may also notice that one of the pirate factions now hunts you with impunity....because they are secretly an arm of the Federation secret police. I'm sure other games simulate these sorts of dynamics much better, but EV NOVA does in broad strokes and understandable game design what Marathon does to its story: focusing less on the simulation aspects while still trying to get the player to have the feeling of the thing.
I played Escape Velocity and EV Override, but missed out on Nova. The first 2 were really good, though.
Ah, yes, the Escape Velocity trilogy really was something. To this day I haven't experienced something that gave me quite that feeling. I still have my EV Nova registration number somewhere.
Excited by the prospect of a EV Override remake in the works: www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-frontier-override/
@@chrisball3778 Nova was great. Override had a certain something to it, though. Wish someone would remake Ares, too.
I would disagree on Halo doing everything better, and I'm saying that as someone who played both on release and recently.
Halo has hilariously better enemy design and gunplay, can even attempt to tell vignette stories with characters, which really fills out the world, not only is technically prettier (of course) but generally has better visual design and diversity of environments throughout - there is a lot to like!
But there was a lot lost in the translation: even if the guns are appropriate they have less diversity and interesting tradeoffs, probably due to having to cope with only having two, but more importantly have far less flair, you don't reload the shotgun by spinning it Terminator style, for example, or have to cope with the machine gun being so inaccurate you have to use it close range, while it also has a grenade launcher you can't.
The mechanical level design is overall far worse in Halo: generally it's a lot of linear corridors between open arenas. This shows off the actually very good gunplay mechanics and AI, but it's rough to come back to after playing a lot of games with good gunplay (the AI still holds up, sadly for modern games), there's essentially no gameplay variation except for different enemy types and vehicle sections. Having the old key/button hunts in a dense, interconnected set of levels that gave some narrative weight to both where you are and what you're doing was a big deal, and didn't have nearly the diminishing returns that trying and failing to run over Elites in a Warthog did.
The story is a bit more contentious: I'm not at all in agreement that Halo's story is all that bad (in comparison to most games at least) but it's generally delivered quite poorly, with overly melodramatic lines and reads - Marathon was written far better purely mechanically, even if you can boil both down to "AI tells a gun on legs where to go to stop aliens". Marathon's story also looks a lot better in hindsight now we have a billion precursor races and destined humanity stories - even if Halo proper shouldn't shoulder most of that blame.
There's all the stuff about the terminals as covered in the video.
But worst of all, you move so goddamn slow in Halo. It's an unforgivable crime.
I really tried to get into Marathon but I think I'm just too much of a Doomer. It never clicked with me and the level design of that first game is really rough.
When I was ten or so our family computer was a Macintosh, so I never had access to all the PC games my friends would play, but we did have a demo version of Marathon. Between my rudimentary school English (not my first language) and being dropped in the middle of the story, I had little idea of what was going on, but I was fascinated by the mysterious figure of Durandal pulling the strings and messing with me somewhere just out of reach. It's cool finding out about the full story and what the different aliens were.
i just wanna say i love yall, you know who you are... the ones who been waiting for the next episode just as patiently as the rest of us.
This was really fascinating! I hadn't even heard of Marathon before. As you said, the design philosophy seems surprisingly modern. Really does seem like a halfway point between Doom and Half-Life. Everyone knows about those two, but this game deserves just as much recognition.
The story actually sounded pretty cool - I bet I would've loved it if I'd played it when I was a kid.
@MEME GOD What don't what?
Ah, it's so cool to have a video on Marathon and its place in FPS history! Great one!
Really looking forward to that Descent video. It was the first video game I ever played as a child and something that I probably haven't touched in about 20 years.
Interesting to note that Ken Levine is a Marathon fan, since he put similarities to the trilogy in both System Shock 2 and Bioshock Infinite, the latter being a secret love letter to Infinity, if you replaced Azathoth with a racist Santa Claus. Doom 4 and Doom Eternal took pages out of Marathon's book as well: both have an improved terminal system and Eternal is not only named after Marathon's best third party mod, but both it and Marathon Eternal share similarities to Sonic 2006:
Marathon Eternal is effectively Silver's story with Hathor as Mephiles, there's a lot of time travel, the Jjaro shield world/Halo ring in Episode 5 and the dream levels looks like Kingdom Valley with a stormy ocean in the sky, there's an insane god or two and _the world fucking ends in the climax._
In Doom Eternal, the praetor tokens look like Soleanna silver medals/coins, the Earth levels are Crisis City in all but name, Cultist Base looks like White Acropolis by way of the Midnight level in Halo 4, Hell looks like Flame Core, the planet you meet the hologram king (I forgot the name of the location) looks like Kingdom Valley, the portal above the Super Gore nest resembles the sun when its about to swallow the Earth (actually from Sonic Forces), the blue portals the Doomguy uses are very similar to the time hole portals Mephiles uses through the story (no relation to the black holes in the final level) and the Maurauder is no use until you work out the pattern, except unlike Silver, he _doesn't_ become piss easy once you know how to deal with him.
Did you really call the W'rkncacnter Azathoth?
@@kenkoopa7903 That's basically what it is, though it's not actually Azathoth. Just the same kind of being, going by the one in Pathways into Darkness.
Absolutly love this video, I always struggled to explain why I loved these games so much, I really hope some day you cover or play Durandal, its the best of the three and I think it could be worth a try. I really like some of the interesting takes you had, now im interested in watching some more of your videos
Awesome video. Some things were reminding me of Descent, and I was gonna look it up after this video, but hadn't remembered the name yet. Thanks!
14:33 He didn't lie. That's a rocket. He just said he didn't give them grenades. Never said anything about rockets.
It has been a while since I've played it, but Pathways into Darkness is another interesting game by Bungie that predates this and doesn't seem to attract a whole lot of attention. It has a similar terminal type narrative system, but the terminals are replaced by dead nazis.
The key difference being that Marathon is easier to get your hands on and more fun.
The monster designs in Pathways were something else- so bizarre and memorable.
Pathways Into Darkness was to Wolf 3D as Marathon was to Doom, if you think about it.
Inglonias not really. Marathon has pretty big mechanical differences compared to Doom like 3D aiming.
@@deriznohappehquite Yeah, I do remember Pathways into Darkness being pretty slow going, but the monsters etc. kept it interesting. It's on the Aleph One engine as well now though, which is nice, not that I've tried it.
Dang, I remember playing this at 50% size with only every other line drawn on the family IIci. When we upgraded to a Performa, loading it up at full graphics blew my mind! Also, didn't know how to circle strafe at first (or even to use the keyboard and mouse together), so I always dodged by backing and turning together (ie AS or SD). Let's just say it got much more enjoyable once I figured out modern controls.
I discovered the Marathon Story Pages back in college and absolutely loved them; reading the story _first_ before playing the games caused my imagination to run wild re. the game universe.
I love that Halo is just a spiritual successor to Marathon. Almost just an update of Marathon for the modern day.
Fantastic video. I picked up Marathon 2 back in 1995 because I had a Mac for the first time and I just wanted an FPS. It was a fantastic choice to get into the genre. It was very interesting to see a cerebral reviewer approach it for the first time over 25 years later.
I love how this game has a better storyline than almost every Sci Fi shooter of the last 20 years. :-D
This was a rather interesting episode--thank you for it! ^_^
I'll confess that I'm a little sad that Heretic isn't getting an episode of its own: I'm inclined to think that even as described here, noting that it's more than just "DOOM in LARP", the game and its distinctiveness are slightly understated. In addition, while DOOM has generally left me cold, I love Heretic.
But ah well, so it goes--and it makes sense, if we're taking large enough strides that we're going to Descent next. (Which, lacking tone in text, I'll note that I say with no criticism.)
And speaking of Descent, I'm excited to see that episode, and the thoughts that you have on the game! ^_^
In addition, it's really nice to see ShadowCaster getting a mention, even if only a passing one. ^_^
It's by no means the saliency that the games covered here tend to be, and so isn't one that I'd likely expect to see given an episode to itself.
But, unlike Heretic on which a fair bit has been said, I feel, I still longingly await the day that a retro-gaming channel makes an in-depth, erudite retrospective and analysis of ShadowCaster. As a result, I'm glad to take a mention such as this when I find it, even if passing! ^_^
So like, in the evolution of the FPS, Marathon is the missing link between System Shock/Doom and Halo/Half-Life? Interesting.
That seems to be the hypothesis, though ES does not demonstrate this in the actual video. Many of the games he talks about around the 20-minute mark had features that would be developed in later titles but a lot of them were not super influential. Shadowcaster, for instance, might have been one of the first games to introduce a more action-orientated take on RPGs but it's also largely unknown, meaning its influence was probably very limited if at all.
Disthron marathon definitely was known to developers at the time, though.
@@deriznohappehquite Hmm... are you sure? I know it's well known today but how do you know this?
Precursor to Halo for sure, because both are Bungie games.
@@Jabrwock Right, but there was a lot of development in FPS between 1994 and 2001
I think I played a few minutes of marathon on a mac performa back in elementary school, it's all vaguely familiar. Thanks for including links to the source ports, great video!
Marathon was my jam back in the day. We had Macintosh Quadras at school and played local multiplayer deathmatch maps every day after class. I only learned it had a campaign years later.
"Marathon is the Dark Souls of FPSs" - Chris "Errant" Signal, 2020
I played through the first Marathon game just a few days ago, so this timing is perfect for me. Although now that I'm playing through Marathon 2 it seems like the first game is the worst one in the series, it's a nice step up in many ways. I just would love to see the style and atmosphere seen in the second game's chapter screens realized with modern graphics.
OMG! OMG OMG OMG YOU DID IT! SOMEONE COVERED MARATHON
Check out The Examined Life (of gaming) he has a whole 3 part series on marathon.
Solid analysis, especially as a new player. Hope you'll get around to playing the sequels at some point, even if we don't get a video about them. Infinity is my personal favorite, but only because it's able to build on the whole series.
Love this series and even though I’m not sure if you will I’m crossing my fingers that you will do a part of this series on Deus Ex. My all time favorite game! Keep doing a fantastic job with your analysis!
How dare you tease me with the implications and possibilities of a "Bungie Monomyth" video essay, good sir.
Marathon to me was like Neo Geo. You never seen it and only knew about it from magazines and your one friend who claimed his uncle had it.
Super interesting to get this historical perspective of the FPS genre, thank you!
Bungie made this freeware back in the day, so I kept it on a thumb drive and would load it on school computers. Made those classes in highschool more bearable.
My 'gateway games' were Chrono Trigger, Baldurs Gate 1 and Secret of Evermore.
I was quite fortunate to have an older brother who knew a lot about what games were good pre-interwebs.
Loved these games as a kid! Great video, you should review durandal and infinity!
I love how these games go big with Durandal's madness as a doorman A.I., by making it a kind of DM level designer: It at first puts you in increasingly maddening doorlock and factory floor mazes to navigate, and then this escalates when it ends up controlling everyone's consciousness, space, and time by series' end.
I could never get through these games more than once; the plot and leveldesign gets too coyly confusing and maddening for me every time. I love these games for that though.
Also my nostalgia brain melted hearing the music, thanks.
Nah, Durandal wasn't controlling shit in Infinity. Hell, that game shows right off the bat that he's just as much a sucker to fate as anyone else.
@@kenkoopa7903 Wait what was the plot of that game again?
@@michelottens6083 A being known as the W'rkncacnter was talked about in legends in Marathon 2, having been sealed in the sun by the S'pht's creators. In Marathon: Infinity, the Pfhor accidentally release the W'rkncacnter with their early nova weapon and it starts causing chaos. It's unclear how, but the SO gains the ability to influence time by slipping through dreamscapes to other timelines (the events of which all spinning off of the events of M2), and their goal is to find the timeline that leads to the W'rkncacnter being sealed back within the sun, which presumably also stops its unleashing within all other timelines as well due to its inherently chaotic nature.
@@michelottens6083 There's actually a handful of charts detailing the different timelines, including one I made that's on the Pfhorums.
@@kenkoopa7903 Thanks for the tight summary! I'd always interpreted game 3 in a way where it was Durandal, as a godlike AI guy, that sends masterchief doomguy through space, time, and bodies. Durandal merged with magick alien tech by game 2's end, right?
I first played Marathon far after its initial release and on the Aleph One engine. To this day, as a coherent universe, few games come close. Many of the things that work in Halo (which feels in some way like Bungie's attempt to do something similar to Marathon without recapitulating the story) come straight from Marathon. It's an underappreciated gem of a series, all because it was developed for Mac OS.