While you wait for Marathon, why don’t you play Marathon, the classic Bungie shooter that’s currently free on Steam.
It’s coming up to a year now since Bungie announced it was bringing back Marathon, one of the studio’s earliest titles and an important ’90s shooter in its own right. There hasn’t been a new entry in the series since the third one, Marathon Infinity, and this new entry will be the first non-Destiny title Bungie has worked on since the original Destiny (which is a decade old this year, sorry to say). Now, though, you’ll be able to pick up the original 1994 game completely for free on Steam, all thanks to the efforts of the Aleph One community of open-source devs.
“This classic 1994 Bungie FPS had a foundational influence on the genre, and is now maintained by the fan community,” reads the game’s description on Steam. “Experience authentic game play using the original data files, with optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, just in case the original is too authentic.” Best of all, both Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity are coming to Steam too, and you can add them both to your wishlist now so you can be notified when they release. All three games will be available on both Mac and Windows, and will include the features listed above too.
With as little information out there as there is for Bungie’s new Marathon, there’s no way of knowing if any of the story from the original trilogy will be relevant to the reboot, though I doubt it will if only for the sake of new players. Plus, new Marathon will unsurprisingly be opting for the live-service route, as it’s a PvP extraction shooter. The reveal trailer certainly looked stylish, but we’ll have to wait and see what gameplay looks like of course.