Marathon

Before there was Halo, Bungie made Marathon. It's one of the best (and most popular) Macintosh-exclusive games of the '90's that is not an arcade game clone. It even comes complete with a mouse looking feature.

Unused Graphic


You never see this ship in the entire game. According to the Shapes file, it would have been seen outside the Pfhor ship. This was intended to be the Marathon, but later games portray the ship as more like a grey egg. Here, the ship looks more like half an asteroid, which makes sense because in the story the Marathon was built out of Deimos.

General
Under STR #128, line number 10 has this string: "This beta copy of Marathon has expired and is no longer functional. Call Bungie at (312) 563-2000 ext. 21 for more information."

Also, under STR #150, Bungie inserted references to Copland and Windows NT under lines 18 and 19. "COPY OF WINDOWS NT" "PIRATED COPLAND BETA" According to the developer message just below, these are cheeky placeholder strings to fill in space created by the removal of a cut weapon.

The first terminal in "Try Again" should display this as part of its message, according to the resource fork: (*&)& &>%*{%rhpejy658[69l[il[70l -0oli77765uI%OI&%

However, this is what's actually displayed in-game: (*&)& &>%*{The colony has been wiped out. Phhht! Just like that.hpejy658[69l[il[70l -0oli77765uI%OI&%

The string "The colony has been wiped out. Phhht! Just like that." is found in the game's code at resource 9, offset 1798 and is not displayed anywhere else in the game. The "%r" in the resource fork is mistakenly interpreted to be this string.

Undisplayed Dialogue
This is the final location.

Good luck.

The last part of the first terminal message in "Defend THIS!" The game can only handle up to eight pages per terminal, and this message would have been the eighth page of nine.
 * END MESSAGE***


 * MESSAGE FROM LEELA***

You have not retrieved the Fusion Gun. Return when you have done so.

From the second terminal in "Cool Fusion." Apparently, the player would have been told if he/she didn't have the fusion gun. Instead, the terminal always allows the player to proceed.
 * END OF MESSAGE***

Developer Messages
The music file has a message for those looking at it with ResEdit. "Yeah, it's all in the data fork. Isn't that weird?"

As an easter egg of sorts for those using ResEdit or a similar resource editing tool, one of the developers inserted a message in the program itself under the TEXT resource fork:

Hey you, looking through my resource fork:

Because of time constraints, many of the interesting parts of Marathon (i.e., the texts, the chapter screens, etc.) were not encrypted like I've done in the past with Minotaur or Pathways. This also makes globalization easier.

So when you read all the computer terminals from ResEdit or find out what the final screen looks like, don't post on comp.sys.mac.games or AOL or whereever you call home on the information toll-road and ruin things for everyone else. Go find it in the game, and tell people how to get themselves there.

I'd also like to say that Greg and I have only slept for 15 hours in the last seven days.

I hope you guys are already working on level editors and figuring out the format of the "Physics Model" file! Competent programmers serious about doing any sort of add-ons to Marathon should e-mail me on the internet at jon3@quads.uchicago.edu for help and (maybe) header files.

Thanks, Jason (Dec. 18, 1994 1:57am.)

PS. In case you were wondering, you can't ever find the pirated copy of Copland in Marathon. That item used to be a weapon that we took out late in development (the copy of Windows NT was it's ammunition) but that will find it's way into the Network Upgrade for Marathon.

A second message was added to the Trilogy version under the same fork: You again?

Two and a half years after the wild coding Blitzkrieg that created Marathon, I'm back here removing the serial number protection for the trilogy release. Without source.

I had this really dumb idea back then that I'd have the game wait until April 1st 1995 before enabling a second layer of serial number verification.

Ha. After hacking out three dialogs from each of the 68k and PowerPC versions, with only MacsBug to light the way, I'm sort of glad I never got time to do that.

Now Myth is the order of the day, and we're aiming for a early fall release. The coming summer won't turn into the unairconditioned blur of boiling late nights ordering pizza and drinking powdered Gatorate to stay hydrated that 1995 was, but I imagine we'll keep busy somehow.

I have this feeling it's going to be snowing again when I have free time again.

So. No serial numbers. It's always bothered me that Marathon's public lifetime would be over when the last registration card or serial number list got lost. Hopefully this is the version that I'll be playing in fifty years under emulation on some fuckfast portable the thickness of a sheet of paper that walks my dog, dresses me every morning and grinds up my food because I don't have any teeth left. And hopefully it won't be running Windows.

Later, Jason (March 17, 1997 4:39pm)

Map Messages
Several levels contain hidden messages in the map geometry that cannot be seen without using a level editor. Some levels have multiple hidden messages. The original capitalization of the text has been preserved.