Marathon (computer game)

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Marathon is the first title in the Marathon series of science fiction first-person shooter computer games from Bungie Software, the same company who created the Halo series. It was released on December 21, 1994.

Story

Set in the year 2794, the game places the player as a security officer dispatched to respond to a distress signal sent from the enormous human colony ship called the Marathon, orbiting the newly colonized planet Tau Ceti IV.

Throughout the game, the player defends the ship and its crew and colonists from a race of alien slavers called the Pfhor. As he fights, he witnesses interactions between the three shipboard artificial intelligences: Leela, Durandal, and Tycho. From these interactions he discovers that all is not as it seems aboard the Marathon.

In the first part of the game, the player follows orders from the ship operations AI, Leela. After executing a series of defensive actions, contact between the Marathon and the human colony is lost. It is revealed that Durandal, another AI onboard the Marathon, has gone rampant and his behavior on the ship begins causing danger to the crew members.

Disabling Leela, Durandal steals the security officer and uses him to free a race of enslaved, cybernetic organisms called the S'pht from their Pfhor masters. With the S'pht in revolt and allied with Durandal, the Pfhor lose control of their ship and are defeated.

There is some speculation that the story of Marathon may have been loosely based on that of the science fiction novel Marathon by David Alexander Smith. [link]

Chapters

The first chapter screen from Marathon

The game consists of twenty-six levels and is divided into six chapters.

• Arrival - The player boards the U.E.S.C. Marathon. Under the direction of Leela he collects some weapons and three replacement circuit boards needed to activate the ship's automated defense drones.
• Counterattack - Once the drones are enabled, the player blocks Durandal's access to them and alerts Earth of the Pfhor. At the end, he encounters Durandal for the first time after being briefly kidnapped by him.
• Reprisal - Leela begins malfunctioning to the point where she becomes unstable. Consisting of only two levels, this is the shortest chapter of the story.
• Durandal - Durandal begins to take control of the player. Three of the four levels to which he is sent seem to have no apparent objective other than to reach the end, and Durandal begins communicating with the player in a series of long, philosophical talks about his rampancy and the abuse by a scientist which engendered it.
• The Pfhor - The player explores the Pfhor ship to retrieve information about it and kills the cyborg Pfhor that controls the S'pht. All but two levels take place on the ship.
• Rebellion - With the aid of the S'pht and the now recovered Leela, the player eliminates the remaining threat aboard the Marathon. Durandal transfers himself to the captured Pfhor ship and leaves to "see the galaxy".

Marathon in play

Omitted content

Before the release, three hostile characters were removed.

One of them, the Armageddon Beast, was apparently an unstoppable, powerful creature that emitted hard and damaging pellets. Another, the Hound, was intended to guard low spots on a level. Though quick, it was unable to climb stairs and could not attack a player from a distance. As beta screenshots and concept drawings reveal, it is possible that the Hound was meant to be a companion to the Hunter. Despite the fact that this alien creature itself did not appear in the game, it is seen on a texture used on levels during the section of the game where the player explores the Pfhor ship. Like the Armageddon Beast, it did not make the final release because Bungie felt that there were no levels suitable on which to do combat with it. Finally, there was a harmless alien civilian meant to be the Pfhor equivalent of the defenseless human crew of the UESC Marathon. Due to technical limits, it was not possible to include them, as they, like their human counterparts, would always be present in large numbers and therefore would exceed the engine's memory limits.

There were weapons removed from the game as well. In a demo version of Marathon, the player was able to obtain a weapon that appeared in the player's inventory as "Pirated Copland Beta", which used ammunition called "Copy of Windows NT". However, the player was unable to use or even see it. According to Jason Jones, this was a shotgun that was removed from the final product late in development and slated to appear in the 20/10 Scenario Pack, an add-on that was later scrapped in order to make way for Marathon 2. Upon examining the game's code, it appears that there is another omitted weapon, the "Wave Motion Cannon". Like the Copland beta, it is unusable. However, it does not appear in the demo version. Very little is known about it, or why it did not make the final cut. (It later appeared in Bungie's game Oni as a huge, ponderously slow but very powerful weapon.)

Trivia

• While the Marathon symbol looks like a magnifying glass, it symbolizes that the UESC Marathon is a world inside of a world; the colony ship was constructed out of Deimos, one of Mars' two moons.
• Marathon has 27 single-player levels. If the levels are numbered from zero (as arrays are numbered in most programming languages), the last level is twenty-six, the number of miles in a marathon race.
• The last polygon of the last level was filled on December 14, 1994. The game was released seven days later.
• Durandal, one of the artificial intelligences in the game, is named after Durendal, a legendary sword.
• Red vs. Blue, a machinma based on the Bungie owned Halo series, features a reference to the Marathon series. The character Church, sets off a 10 Megaton Bomb that sends his allies forward in time to the Halo's sequel Halo 2. At the same time, he is blown backwards in time to the game before Halo: Combat Evolved in Marathon.

See also

• Marathon Trilogy

External links

• [Marathon's Story: Arrival] all the game's terminals and game information.
• [Marathon: Overview] Traxus Project's article about the game.
• [Marathon Spoiler Guide]

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