Marathon
From Bungiepedia
Marathon is a video game series created by Bungie Studios. It was released on December 21, 1994. After the first Marathon game, two sequels were born; Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity.
Marathon was a forerunner in 3D graphics, unparalleled by most PC games of it's time. Supporting that, it also had an extremely in-depth storyline, of which a large group of people are still uncovering, as well as a highly addictive multiplayer mode.
[edit] Storyline
Spoiler Warning: This section contains spoilers.
Marathon opens in the year 2794 on board the massive colony ship UESC Marathon, in orbit over the planet Tau Ceti. The ship, which consists of Mars's moon Deimos with a huge inbuilt superstructure, has just been mysteriously attacked by a magnetic pulse weapon on an unidentified ship. This pulse has disabled the Marathon's science/engineering and autonomous function AIs (Tycho and Durandal, respectively) and caused the ship severe damage. The race on board the unidentified ship are a species of insectoid slavers called the Pfhor. The player character, an unidentified Marathon security officer, must repel the Pfhor attack over the course of six chapters, each divided into several levels.
The game is quite different from most modern games in that its plot is revealed not through cutscenes, but terminals. These public, wall mounted computers provide the player with orders from the AIs, general background story, and other essential (or non-esssential) pieces of knowledge. Leela, the ship's command AI, is mostly behind these orders at the start and end of the game, but Durandal controls the player for two chapters in the middle of the game. The relationship between Tycho, Durandal and Leela is a significant part of the game's plot.
The game opens with the player making basic preparations for outright battle with the Pfhor; he amasses a stash of weapons such as the Assault Rifle, Flamethrower and Fusion Pistol. Immediately afterwards, with Leela's help, he activates the Marathon's Defense Drones and warns Earth of the Pfhor attack. Over this time, the player becomes aware that ten "Mjolnir cyborgs" were on board the Marathon when it launched from Mars over three hundred years ago. He also encounters several different types of Pfhor: the Fighters, weak, cannon-fodder soldiers; the Troopers, better-armed and -armored; and the Hunters, armored foes with high-powered cannons. He also encounters several enslaved species in the Pfhor's service: the conditioned ranks. These include the Hulks, or Drinniol (giant, lumbering monsters that pack a deadly punch), the Wasps (flying insects which are easily killed, but spit acid at the player) and the S'pht Compilers (floating cybernetic beings of immense intelligence which the Pfhor are using to attack the AIs of the Marathon). Furthermore, he learns that Durandal is not so badly damaged after all, and that there exists a rare condition in AIs called Rampancy, which greatly increases the AI's powers at the cost of its sanity.
En route by teleportation to one of Leela's battlegrounds, the player is abruptly kidnapped by Durandal. Clearly undergoing rampancy, Durandal sends the player into increasingly desperate situations against the Pfhor and their higher-ranking Enforcers, buying time for Durandal to communicate with the S'pht hive mind. Eventually, he comes to an uderstanding with the S'pht, and teleports the player to the Pfhor's ship in order to learn more about them, while undermining their control of the vessel. In doing so, he discovers the Durandal's old master, Bernhard Strauss (who was initially responsible for Durandal's rampancy) has ben captured and probably killed by the Pfhor. Despite some vindictive glee on Durandal's part, he is sobered when Tycho reappears on the Marathon, claiming that the S'pht, on the Pfhor's orders, reanimated him in Durandal's image, with the consequence that he is now rampant.
Undeterred, Durandal sends the player to the Pfhor ship's command center with orders to kill a certain cyborg. If this cyborg dies, the S'pht will no longer be enslaved by the Pfhor; instead, they will fight against them. At length, the player accomplishes this task, and the S'pht rebel against their masters. As the Pfhor ship is being overthrown from within and the player's efforts to defend the Marathon continue, the Pfhor find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Durandal reactivates Leela to direct the player against the Pfhor's tank-like Juggernaut robots and defeat the Pfhor at their last stand, the engineering bays. Durandal uses the Pfhor's light-speed communications systems to transfer himself into the Pfhor ship, the Sfiera (or, as he calls it, the Boomer), and Leela leads the player to a glorious victory. As the player relaxes in triumph, he learns that the Pfhor's invasion of Tau Ceti was a failure; nine "Mjolnir cyborgs" were able to fight back against the Pfhor assault. As he wonders where the tenth cyborg was, the player is suddenly kidnapped one more time by Durandal. Put into cryo-freeze on the Boomer, he is not awakened for seventeen years...
[edit] Download
You can download the entire Marathon Trilogy for the Mac and Marathon 2 for the PC, along with other old school Bungie games here.
[edit] External links
- Marathon on Traxus Project, a Marathon series wiki
- Marathon (Game) on Pfhorpedia, an alternative Marathon wiki
