Gamers can now hop into a time machine to 1994 to experience the roots of the developers of Halo and Destiny with Classic Marathon, which is available on Steam for free.
Bungie is well-known for its FPS titles that reshaped the genre, like the original Halo trilogy along with the Destiny franchise, but it started out way back in the early 1990s with games like Marathon.
A new entry in the Marathon series, an extraction shooter, is currently under development by the studio as it also continues work on Destiny 2 and whatever else lies beyond it. But before that, Classic Marathon and two more games, Classic Marathon Infinity and Classic Marathon 2, are coming to Steam.
“Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony,” the game’s description says. “The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat.”
The game also has “optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60-plus interpolation,” along with 12 Steam achievements for players to unlock as they play through the classic title.
Classic Marathon features that wonderful ’90s shooter aesthetic, akin to games like DOOM or Wolfenstein, along with a HUD that displays tons of information, as seen in the image above.
At the price of nothing and a download size of just 66 MB, it can’t hurt to download Classic Marathon and give it a try while waiting for the newest game to come out. It’s the epitome of the “boomer shooter” that has seen a resurgence with new entries from across the industry over the past few years.
The new Marathon game, along with the classic Steam sequels, currently have no scheduled release date.
