While Marathon waits somewhere on the other side of Destiny 2 for its highly saturated extraction shooter reboot The final formAnyone who has never played the Mac original from 1994 will soon have another chance. Classic marathon, a freeware fan revival for modern systems, is coming to Steam. Experience the roots of Bungie's passion for neurotic AI. Look at the mythical origins the SPNKR. And yes, you can still use the clunky, off-center interface.
Although it will be a new addition to Steam, this incarnation of Marathon – along with the rest of the Marathon trilogy – has been playable on current systems for years thanks to the efforts of Aleph One Development team. Aleph One is a community-managed revival project and open source engine developed for current systems and based on the Marathon 2 source code, which Bungie made freely available prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 1999.
The Steam release of Classic Marathon lets you play a near-authentic recreation of the original Marathon experience. However, if you want to revisit the FPS classic while maintaining our current sensibilities, it includes some optional modernizations like 60fps+ interpolation and support for widescreen HUD. I'll forgive you if you don't tolerate the asymmetrical HUD situation as well as someone might have 30 years ago.
Although it is a purely community project, Bungie has given its enthusiastic hands-off blessing. “Yes, this is real and will be free,” Bungie said when asked for comment. “We strongly support the Marathon community and Aleph One's commitment to bringing the original Marathon to PC, Linux and Mac for everyone to experience, with cross-platform multiplayer play. This is a true homage to the original game.” !”
Interestingly, although the Steam listing does include cross-platform multiplayer in its feature overview, the Aleph One developers said about it in a thread Marathon subreddit that they only promise Windows support for the Steam version. In other words, while the Steam version of Classic Marathon will only be available for Windows, you'll likely still be able to connect with Mac and Linux players who otherwise have Marathon installed through the Aleph One website.
We don't yet have a release date for when Classic Marathon will arrive on Steam, but we expect it to beat the Marathon reboot's expected release in 2025. However, if you're dying to take on Pfhor today, all three Marathon Trilogy games are playable and free to download the Aleph One Engine website. There are also a ton of marathon stories created by the community, as well as something called Marathon: Yuge. Explore at your own risk, I guess.
