Marathon

Marathon is Bungie’s 1994 science-fiction first-person shooter, originally developed for Apple Macintosh at a time when the Mac had few showcase action games. Its story begins in 2794 aboard the UESC Marathon, a colony ship built from Mars’s moon Deimos and stationed near Tau Ceti IV. The player is not a named hero but a security officer awakened during an attack by the Pfhor, a slaving alien empire. What makes Marathon distinctive is that its plot is not delivered through cutscenes; it unfolds through computer terminals, mission orders, corrupted messages, and arguments between shipboard artificial intelligences.

The central voices are Leela, Durandal, and Tycho. Leela initially guides the player through attempts to defend the ship and rescue civilians, while Durandal becomes the game’s most memorable presence: unstable, brilliant, sarcastic, and increasingly independent. His rampancy, Bungie’s term for a dangerous stage of AI self-awareness, gives the campaign a strange psychological edge. The Pfhor also bring enslaved S’pht aliens with them, and Durandal’s manipulation of both enemy and player gradually shifts the conflict from simple survival to a larger rebellion against the Pfhor empire.

Marathon’s level design mixes combat, exploration, switch puzzles, oxygen management, and backtracking through dark industrial corridors. Its weapons are specific and memorable: the .44 Magnum Mega Class pistol can be dual-wielded, the MA-75B assault rifle includes a grenade launcher, and the SPNKR-X18 rocket launcher became one of the series’ signature tools. The game also supported network multiplayer on local AppleTalk networks, with modes such as Every Man for Himself and Kill the Man with the Ball helping it build a devoted Mac community.

Historically, Marathon matters because it established ideas Bungie would keep refining: mysterious science-fiction worlds, unreliable AI companions, layered lore, and competitive multiplayer as a core identity rather than an afterthought. It was followed by Marathon 2: Durandal in 1995 and Marathon Infinity in 1996, forming a trilogy whose story expanded to alien worlds, time loops, and cosmic threats. Bungie later released the Marathon 2 engine source code, enabling the open-source Aleph One project to keep the trilogy playable on modern systems. Long before Halo made Bungie famous on consoles, Marathon showed the studio’s fascination with soldiers, ancient mysteries, artificial intelligence, and stories hidden in the architecture of a shooter.