Marathon Games on Steam
Bungie has finally brought all of the “Marathon” trilogy of games to Steam, with “Marathon Infinity” now playable for free on modern Macs.
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Classic Marathon Infinity is a free game on the Steam storefront, playable on both Mac and Windows PC. It is a faithful re-release of the 1995 first-person shooter, using the original data files, but modernized.
These modernizations include widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, all under the Aleph One game engine.
Previously:
- Monument Valley 3 in Netflix Games
- Sony Acquires Bungie
- The Secret History of Mac Gaming
- Pathways Into Darkness
- Carbonized Myth II
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Steam has an app for AppleTV (it links from a Mac running Steam to an AppleTV) so I thought I could even have the games on AppleTV, but I could never get the ^@#$%$@## link to work.
That being said, I loved the Marathon trilogy, so I sure am glad to see it free on Steam!
And as if by magic I can purchase the free game using my Android phone and then play it on my Mac or PC or both!
Thank Gods for competition.
The trilogy has been free on the iOS / iPad OS App Store for years (as separate Apps)
They work very well with touch interface
I don’t remember the exact figure but the original Marathon should have been around 50 MB installed. @Niall do you happen to know why the mobile incarnation is ten times as much?
@Wu Ming The simple answer is that assets are much larger than they used to be. Even though the game looks the same as we remember it, those graphical assets are scaled up to look respectable on larger and more pixel-dense screens. Same with audio — it’s the same as we remember it, but it’s actually much higher quality now because the sound isn’t compressed as severely as it was when that was necessary back then.
Another aspect for audio is especially Marathon 1's music (maybe the rest too?) was MIDI (very compact), and relied on the somewhat unusual Apple MIDI implementation in QuickTime 2.x. A few years later Apple either improved, or simply changed it and all of a sudden the music sounded bizarre (or at least very different). So I must assume the music in these games is compressed recordings like a MP3, instead.
