The game gives a first-person view of one's surroundings, rendered in 3-D -- and one has to fight the often hostile inhabitants of these surroundings. But one can pick up various weapons and ammo, and one will sometimes be helped by various friends who fight on your side. The game even features a plot, spelled out in various displays that one can access as one plays. Instructions, information, anecdotes, various comments... even a plot. Though its first-person-shooter competition now often surpasses it in features, it is curious that this feature is rarely imitated. And that friendly characters are also rarely imitated. The game Unreal has some friendly characters and a Universal Translator, but no characters who fight on your side -- and the Universal Translator messages are abysmally childish by Marathon standards.
Before continuing, I would like to note some additional pages of mine: my Marathon Gallery, which contains some screenshots I've made of the game, featuring one of my favorite monsters in it; my Marathon Downloads, from which one can download various stuff I've created, my First or Third Person? page, which shows what Marathon would look like if it was changed from a 1st-person to a 3rd-person point of view, and my engine-improvements page, which explains what would be necessary to get Marathon up to the standards of some current games. For those who would prefer priorities, check out my engine-priorities page.
And last, but not least of my pages is my Aleph-One Page, home to my contributions to a project to improve Marathon's source code.
And here is the plot: In Marathon 1, you have to fight a whole lot of nasties called Pfhor that have taken over a colony ship, the Marathon. And fight and fight and fight. The Marathon can get awfully dark and gloomy at times, and you get to visit the Pfhor ship, which can get awfully spooky. And some of the environment can be awfully tricky to get through. I had to read someone's spoiler file just to properly set up the central pillars in "Colony Ship For Sale: Cheap", which was really tricky.
In Marathon 2: Durandal, you are dragged across the Galaxy by Durandal, one of the Marathon's artificial-intelligence personalities, who has captured that Pfhor ship. You are to search a distant world for some secrets that Durandal is looking for, secrets he hopes to use against the Pfhor. And along the way, you have to confront a Pfhor garrison and plenty of less-than-friendly natives. And you get to go where not many gamers get to go -- underneath various liquids.
Marathon Infinity takes up where Marathon 2 left off, and its plot is extremely complicated -- one gets somehow tossed back in time -- more than once. Is one working for Tycho? Durandal? Some S'pht AI? The Pfhor? (!) Furthermore, friends and foes often change from level to level, making gameplay delightfully tricky :-) However, if you wish to have some of your confusion sorted out for you, check out this timeline.
Also, for more about some of the astronomical stuff in the game, check out this page: Tau Ceti and more. Most recently, Bungie has put all three games together in one package, the Marathon Trilogy, and has included an enormous collection of maps, patches, tools, and so forth. CD-ROM's are so wonderfully capacious. :-) Bungie has also licensed the Marathon engine to some others, who have created with it GT Interactive's ZPC and WizardWorks's Damage, Inc. and Prime Target. However, Bungie has moved on to other projects.
Also, the levels of Marathon Infinity were created by a new gaming company, Double Aught, which includes Bungie guy Greg Kirkpatrick and Marathon enthusiast Randy Reddig. This company had been working on a new game, titled Duality, which will have some advanced networking features and Quake-ish full-scale 3D. However, Double Aught had run out of money, and that game is now canceled.
I note in passing that to make the infinity symbol (ASCII-art version: oo) with a Macintosh, press option-5, at least if the current font supports that character (the default system fonts do). If you are not sure, open Key Caps or some similar utility. Warning: this infinity symbol may not be displayed properly on non-MacOS systems, which tend to have different sets of nonstandard characters.
There is a BIG on-line archive of Marathon stuff at this Marathon-archive site, One can find FAQ's and discussion of various Marathon features (its storyline, for example), numerous utilities, such as data-file editors and cheaters (you can give yourself as much endurance and weapons as you want with them), maps, collections of alternative sounds, and so forth. This site, Bungie.org, and Rampancy.net, have numerous links to other Marathon sites, and I see no point in needless duplication.
One feature of Marathon fandom is the creation of large quantities of maps, artwork, etc. by various Marathon enthusiasts; this was initially done with the help of various amateur-written tools, though Bungie has now released two very good tools for that purpose, Forge and Anvil, which I will describe below. I note in passing that Bungie refrained from using a spelling pun common among Marathondom, one inspired by the name of the game's principal villain ("Pfhorge").
Marathon 1 saw two map editors, Pfhorte and Mia, and some editors for shapes, sounds, and the Physics Model (miscellaneous parameters that cover how characters and weapons behave, among other things). There are even some complete scenarios for it, but that has required patching the Marathon 1 engine to change the terminal texts. Marathon 2 had a more modular format, and the ability to select different data files. It eventually got a good physics-model editor, Anvil by Michael Hanson, who went on to write Anvil. It also got only one map editor, a rather buggy version of Pfhorte, and (for whatever reason) no shapes editors. But the terminal displays were moved into the map file; one can add artwork with ResEdit (Apple's excellent tool for editing Resource Forks), and add text with a tool called "Hex!", which operates in WYSIWYG mode, colors and all.
I've found Forge to be an excellent mapmaking tool; one alternates between a floor-plan view and a rendered-preview view that one can wander around inside. In floor-plan mode, one can set the minimum and maximum heights of polygons to display, so one can more easily build multifloor maps. In rendered-preview mode, one can paint textures and lighting onto surfaces, and align as desired. I've had much more success making maps with Forge than with Pfhorte, because Forge has built-in error checking that indicates when something is unrenderable (the game itself often crashes, which is rather unhelpful). However, Forge still has some warts, such as specifying the shapes file for its map previews, and how one assembles final maps from individual-level maps, physics-model files, and terminal-text files. For working with the latter, "Hex!" is still ahead of Bungie; one has to put a lot of command codes into terminal-text files, which "Hex!" does in behind-the-scenes fashion.
Anvil is for editing shapes, soundfiles, and physics models. I've already had such fun as giving Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity each other's surface textures, and I've done such amusing things as create purple F'licktas. It has a facility for creating patches, but that facility has continued to be buggy, despite Michael Hanson's best efforts.
About stuff made with these tools, Bungie requests that the following legal disclaimer be issued:
"Copyright 1996 in whole or in part Bungie Software Products Coporation. Created with Bungie's Forge and/or Anvil by: (YOUR NAME, YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS)"
And one is not allowed to charge anything for one's creations. Interestingly enough, one Marathon-archive maintainer has reported that when some wanted to charge for their creations, this request was met with outrage.
I've already created some Marathon stuff for all you people to download at your pleasure: my Marathon Downloads section.
To my game-room page.