With Bungie’s reboot of their ‘90s FPS a year away, free fan revival Classic Marathon wins the race onto Steam
Bungie’s reboot of their nineties pre-Halo debut shooter Marathon seems to be slowing down its pace a little in order to get across the finish line, with a change in director and a delay meaning the multiplayer-only loot-shooter reimagining of the FPS is now expected to arrive next year - or potentially even after that, according to recent reports.
In the meantime though, another revival of the 30-year-old former Mac exclusive looks set to beat the original developers at their own race onto Steam.
Fan-made port Classic Marathon is exactly as it sounds: the original shooter tweaked to run on modern-day hardware, with some added features like widescreen support, improved audio, 3D filtering/perspective and 60+ fps interpolation. All those are optional if you want to relive the days of 1994, mind.
The first Marathon - along with its two sequels - has technically been available for a number of years thanks to Aleph One, an open-source engine built off the code of Marathon 2 released by Bungie before being picked up by Microsoft, which can run all of the games and is free to download.
Classic Marathon, however, will make doing all that just a smidge easier, as its community-led team have confirmed they will be bringing the shooter as a ready-to-play experience to Steam “soon”.
Before you worry about the longevity of a fan-made re-release of the shooter, know that the project even has Bungie’s blessing, who confirmed to PC Gamer that Classic Marathon is “a true tribute to the original game”.
Somewhat ironically, given that Marathon was a Mac exclusive at the time of its original release, the Steam version of Classic Marathon will only work on Windows. It’ll be able to play cross-platform multiplayer with those running Aleph One on Mac and Linux, though.
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