Back in the days before Bungie was cranking out "Halo" titles as a subsidiary of Microsoft, they were actually making games for Mac computers. In 1994, the young studio released a sci-fi first-person shooter called "Marathon." The game was a success for the Mac community, who enjoyed the game's technological advancements, like aiming with the mouse – a new thing for the time – and actually spawned itself a bit of a cult following that exists to this day. Starting today, "Marathon" makes a return to the Apple platform, thanks to one indie developer.
Daniel Blezek, a programmer for a medical center by day, was interested in iOS development since the release of the iPad. While playing through the "Marathon" trilogy, he started to think about what it would be like to play the 1994 game on Apple's tablet. He started working on the project in 2010, and bringing this old-school shooter to life hasn't been easy.
"The 'Marathon' source code was released to the open source community in 1999 and has had 12 years of open source development," Blezek said during an interview with Bungie.net. "Digging into this code base to make the port happen and follow the iOS conventions was a huge effort. On top of that, the code depended on a wide range of libraries that also needed to be ported to the iOS. It was months before the code even built without errors."
A couple weeks ago, after word of Blezek's port got out, Bungie actually stepped forward to show their full support on the project. A very cool thing in this age of cease-and-desists and scrapped "Streets of Rage" remakes.
Want to know the best thing about the "Marathon" iPad app? It's absolutely free. That is, if you're cool with playing with the dated resolution. If you want to play with high resolution textures, you can pay $3.99 via in-game purchase. Honestly, it would probably be a good idea to fork over the four bucks, not just to play a better looking game, but to support guys like Blezek. Who knows, with enough support, maybe we'll see the other two "Marathon" games ported, too.