Dear Craig,
Before you get flamed out of here, I thought I'd take the opportunity to welcome you to the Marathon Story Forum and to invite you to participate in all of our discussions except those related to the Halo books. If you'll look at the most recent posts to this thread - they've been a debate about whether or not to stifel free speech and lock this thread to prevent further posts. After all, posts about the Halo books belong on the Halo forum, not here.
So what is Marathon? I've you've followed the links on the HBO site, you know that Marathon was Bungie's first major 3D FPS game (well, Pathways into Darkness was their first, but it was really little more than a 2D game). Why after nearly 10 years are people still talking about Marathon and why, unlike Doom, hadn't you heard of it before? First of all, Bungie was originally a Mac-only company and except for Marathon 2, the games in the trilogy only were made for the Mac platform. This is no longer an issue, thanks to Aleph One, an open source initiative that will let you play all the Marathon games and most of the 3rd party scenarios that have come out since on a PC.
What really distniguishes Marathon from the rest of the pack is that it was the first game on any platform to tightly integrate story and gameplay. Marathon wasn't about a series of mindless directives to shoot everything up. Marathon was about fighting off an alien attack, dealing with a rampant AI who seemed to be as hostile as the aliens, liberating an enslaved race so that they could help you, finding an ancient secret burried deep in their lost world that could help you defeat your common enemy and then trying against all odds to prevent the release of an even more evil race that could and in effect did destroy the universe, forcing you to go back in time and try again. If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, keep in mind that Bungie wrote Marathon and Halo, too. But the story element was much more fully developed in Marathon than in Halo.
Now compared to Halo, Marathon seems very crude, but if you like science fiction and if cool graphics aren't as important to you as an engrossing plot, you really shold give Marathon a try. You can start by going to the Bungie.net Marathon Page,then head over to marathon.bungie.org for a more comprehensive set of links.
