MULTI-MARATHON

20-ODD YEARS OF BUNGIE SEQUELS

» [PC] Weapon terminology has remained consistent; the Zeus RG is a popular railgun in modern Marathon.

Bungie followed up Marathon with two direct sequels in the Nineties. Marathon 2: Durandal was named after the mercurial AI who had both helped and hindered you in the first game, and was set primarily on the S’pht planet of Lh’owon (bless you). Improving tech meant Bungie could widen the player’s view, and the immersion factor was further enhanced by new atmospheric effects – including ambient sound like wind and alarms. Since the sequel took place mostly outside, its levels were larger and easier to traverse. Not to mention more brightly coloured.

Work began on Marathon Infinity just a few months later, but already the FPS landscape was fundamentally changing.

Quake was the talk of the town, and since Marathon’s original programmers had moved onto Bungie’s next project, there was little scope to significantly alter the way the series played. Infinity’s standout feature was a single new gun. But it did boast a surreal, dimension-hopping plot, and a journey that branched a little depending on player decisions. It also leaned heavily on levels that demanded you keep your oxygen meter topped up, which gave it a distinct character. Mac gamers lapped it up.

Bungie’s modern-day Marathon reboot retained Infinity’s sense of hard-won survival, but otherwise belongs to a different sort of FPS subgenre entirely: the extraction shooter. Players compete on the surface of Tau Ceti IV, in the shadow of the UESC Marathon, to scavenge loot from a failed colony. On the one hand, this is a stealth game – one that demands you learn the soundscape of the hostile planet around you if you’re to have a chance of reading a dangerous situation correctly.

On the other, it’s a team shooter in which you’re rewarded for close coordination and the combined use of cooldown abilities. Trigger the Assassin’s smoke bomb at the same time as the Recon’s detection radar and you’ve won yourself a meaningful advantage in a fight.

Despite all the change, the reboot is surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the original trilogy’s story. Bungie’s tagline for the new game, “Escape will make me god,’ is a direct quote from Durandal himself, rooted in 1994. Marathon players are still, after all these years, being shunted around at the whim of corporate AIs. Some fans have even speculated the new game takes place in one of Infinity’s failed dimensions. A chilling thought.