Bungie Might Be Working on a Marathon Reboot for 2025

Owen S. Good, writing for Polygon:

Bungie intends to reboot its seminal, 1990s sci-fi shooter Marathon, according to a report on Thursday. The game, said to be in a pre-alpha state, will return as a squad-based, team-extraction type multiplayer shooter, according to Insider Gaming. Bungie did not acknowledge the rumor, Insider Gaming said, and a public relations agency declined to comment. [...]

Marathon, which launched in 1994, was a critical and commercial success and, notably, an Apple MacOS exclusive. So were its two sequels, 1995’s Marathon 2: Durandal (although a version for windows launched one year later) and 1996’s Marathon Infinity. The series launched one year after Id Software’s groundbreaking Doom for MS-DOS and Windows PCs, and was a standard-bearer in Macintosh desktop gaming’s brief heyday from 1995 to 1997.

That would be “Mac OS exclusive”, with a space, thank you very much. And indeed, Marathon exemplified the heyday of Mac gaming. Just a fantastic game in every regard. I hope it’s true that Bungie is rebooting it, and I hope they do it justice.

(That said, the description from Insider Gaming of the game Bungie is purportedly working on sounds nothing like Marathon, and more like some fool at Bungie found “Marathon” in a dusty folder named “Unused Intellectual Property”.)

★ Friday, 21 October 2022