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How About An Open Source Marathon?

How About An Open Source Marathon?

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Before there was Halo, there was Marathon.

It’s too oft forgotten that Bungie’s original stance was as an Apple exclusive designer. They produced games for the Mac back when there was actually a hardware difference between Apples and PCs. Pre-G4, even Pre-G3, Bungie became particularly famous for the Marathon series of first-person shooters.

There were three: Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal (the only one officially ported to Windows), and Marathon Infinity. Now, whether you run Mac, Windows or Linux, the entire trilogy is available to you free of charge. Marathon has gone open source.



Courtesy of the Aleph One project, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, all three games are downloadable via SourceForge. Aleph One, itself, is a game engine based on the one from Marathon 2 (of note, the version of Marathon 2 on the Aleph One site contains the graphical updates from the XBLA version) and designed for use by the modding community, who have already put together numerous new levels and even total conversions of the Marathon games.

By Shelby Reiches

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