"Don't buy into this game's oldschool hype, Marathon is just a "Good" game."

You may have heard of Bungie because of the infamous game called Halo. Well before Bungie was busy taking over the world with Master Chief and before they were working for Microsoft, they were pretty much doing the exact opposite a little over ten years ago. They were making good games for the Mac, stuff like Pathways to Darkness, Myth and other games. Their first trilogy before Halo was Marathon, and this game pretty much took center stage before Microsoft acquired them. Marathon was known as a start to a very memorable series of games on the Mac and PC and was probably the start of Halo.

Today Marathon is pretty much open source and you can download all three of the games for your PC using the Aleph One engine. Through these means I was able to play the first Marathon game. The best way to really describe Marathon and especially back then is like Doom for the Mac except Aliens replace Demons. Marathon is also known for it's quite sophisticated story, which is surprising for First Person Shooters from the year 1994, sadly though it's story telling elements never really changed at all after two sequels came. So does Marathon really live up to it's somewhat mythic expectations, you're about to find out.

Presentation

The game's menus and what not work pretty decently, sometimes when you start the game up though it likes to do this odd fade in fade out thing at the main menu and you can't do anything until it's done, it only lasts a few seconds though so all is well. A few other errors only really come with the Hi Res graphics packages you can download, whenever you load a saved game or the game shows a screen transitioning you to the next level, if you click a bunch of times or do anything while it's loading, the game will load but the graphics and everything are all glitched up and you can't see anything. The game's story is quite good but it starts out very slow and only really gets interesting when you find a few logs that aren't by your AI friend Leela, or until you start talking to another AI named Durandal. You are a random security guard or something, like in Doom when you're a random Space Marine, but you're enhanced or I suppose you are…I mean when you punch people screaming “They're everywhere!!” they explode. Wow…

But yeah, your station, the Marathon is taken over by a big group of aliens, and they knocked out all the AIs that run the station except for Leela. Leela helps you by giving you the skinny on everything and doing things like teleporting you to different areas in the Marathon. Eventually you are introduced to the other AI known as Durandal, who is an AI that has gone rampant, which means they realize they are an AI and can think freely. Meeting up with Durandal and reading his strange musings are quite interesting and help to break up the monotony of just reading mission objectives from Leela. But that brings me to how the story is told, only through terminals throughout The Marathon.

Most of the time it's just Leela or Durandal talking but sometimes you'll find records of things that have happened over the past or logs by different people in the Marathon. It's done in a very Resident Evil like fashion, mostly retrospective in nature excluding the AIs. This nature of storytelling is fine for the time the game was made, but as far as I know the other games don't really get past this whole terminal business.
Score: 10 – Amazing

Gameplay

The gameplay is a lot like Doom's except you move really, really fast. Also there is one level where you're kinda in the vacuum of space, and you need Oxygen to survive, on top of that you're only limited to your .44 Magnum Pistol or a Fusion Pistol which fires energy. One thing that may bother people when they play this is the fact that you can't reload, and sometimes when you don't wanna waste the rest of the clip and you go into a big horde of aliens, you'll have to reload at the worst possible times, this can get you killed sometimes. Another thing is sometimes you'll notice that eventually your weapon arsenal isn't as strong as it should be at this point of the game, but I guess this is sort of a difficulty factor thing, some weapons just aren't plain effective most of the time. Like the machine gun is really only worth using at close range, I mean like almost in your face range, the only thing that makes it really useful is the grenade launcher.

Also the really fast movement thing can make things somewhat erratic, especially when you have to do a really half assed attempt at platforming. You can't jump in this game, so instead you have to basically run across something to get to the next thing, since you move so fast sometimes you can become really disoriented and fall off or something, sometimes falling to your doom. The gameplay in this is somewhat iffy really, but if you can get used to everything you'll have some fun. The real lack of weapons in the game though is pretty disappointing.

Score: 8 – Great

Graphics

The graphics in this game are literally what you make of it. You can either stick with the default ones or go download the Hi Res graphics packs that are available. If you get them they will come with some errors but if you know what you're doing they shouldn't happen. I recommend that you go get them if you think about trying this game.

Score: 9 – Awesome

Sound

I've heard that the other two games don't have any music, which is kind of disappointing, but this game does. The music can be pretty hit and miss and sometimes the sheer obviousness that they are MIDI tunes destroy the songs. But for the most part the music is pretty good, sometimes it can be very atmospheric or even chilling. The sound effects are also really nice, except for certain ones that make you grate your teeth because of the high pitch of them.

Score: 8 – Great

Replay

Honestly when or if you finish the game's single player, you may have had enough of it because the game is so long. Sure it's got the same amount of levels as say Doom but this game is hard. Sometimes you'll be overwhelmed by enemies and get stuck multiple times and give up for a while in frustration, or a level has a really vague objective and you won't know what to do in order to progress, which happens quite a bit. These two things may discourage you from playing this game, but it's worth it if you can deal with it, I would also say lack of a real decent guide on here doesn't really help things, perhaps someone will step up some day to the task, but I doubt it.

There is some multiplayer that actually goes on with this game but it's very little. You'll probably find more people playing Marathon 2 or Infinity than this game, in fact you should probably just go play those online instead of the first game.

Score: 6 – Decent

Overview

Honestly, I don't think the first Marathon game really deserves the praise it gets. Compared to the first Doom or even Wolfenstien 3D. The game does stand toe to toe with each of them but only really surpasses them in story telling and that's pretty much it. The lack of any real good guides on the net can hinder your experience somewhat, there is a guide here for Marathon but it's a real mess and not too helpful. I would say that this is because lack of proper word getting out that Marathon is open source. Perhaps it's just because it's the first game, perhaps it isn't, but overall Marathon is a pretty good game.

Score: 8.4 - Great

Modified to 8/10 for Gamefaqs.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/08

Game Release: Marathon (US, 1994)