4 Ways Marathon Influenced Modern Games

ign.com:

Bungie’s announcement of a reimagined Marathon as a PvP extraction shooter during the May 24 PlayStation Showcase was certainly a pleasant surprise.

It was clear from comments on Twitter and in the live chat during the stream that there’s a whole generation of gamers unaware of the impressive 29 year legacy behind the name, and let’s face it: why would they be?

Save for a free release designed to work on modern Macs, PCs, and Linux systems in 1999, an Xbox Live Arcade port of Marathon: Durandal in 2007, a port to iOS in 2011, and a bunch of easter eggs hidden in both Halo and Destiny (the Marathon symbol pops up all over the place in the first three Halo games, for example) the franchise has been left alone since the third game in the trilogy, Marathon: Infinity, released in October 1996.The original Marathon from 1994 runs on modern Windows PCs, Macs and Linux-based devices and can be downloaded for freeWhile the new game will feature an Altered Carbon-style transfer of human consciousness into customizable clones that fight in a competitive extraction shooter scenario (if you’re unfamiliar with this most in-vogue genre of modern live service shooters, think Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown where you’re collecting loot and fighting against things in the environment as well as other players before getting out intact) the 1994 original was an early example of a methodical story-based first-person shooter, similar in some regards to Warren Spector’s System Shock which shipped that same year.

While the December 1993 release of Doom for MS-DOS-based PCs is remembered for establishing many of the conventions we take for granted today, Marathon’s contributions to the modern lexicon of game design are often overlooked