: The way I found out Marathon became freeware and the aleph one engine existed
: way back in the day was from a zdoom mod trying to emulate marathon
: terminals, and couldn't help but go looking if marathon was still
: obtainable in THE FAR FUTURE OF 2007 (man I'm feeling old)
Oh wow, I did necro pretty bad didn't I? The whole of the 2020s have felt like one long year to me.
In any case, my relation to doom and marathon is backwards to your experience. I wanna say in around 07 or 08, I was getting into Linux through my studies and got exposed to a lot of open source stuff. I think I discovered aleph one through the open source community (it used to pop up on "top open source games" type lists often) and decided to give it a spin since I had a lot of buddies who were hardcore halo nerds. Really got into reading the story page around then too. Like I'd sit there in my dorm all night reading "facts and curious things about..." on a little old nokia phone.
Tried mapping a little, but back then the only thing I could get working was map editor one, which I just couldn't get the hang of. Pretty sure most of the interface was in japanese too, so it was pretty difficult lol.
Doom came a lot later. I think I got into it through seeing Samsara in around 2014, which lets you play as the Marathon Security Officer in doom. From there, I started trying to make marathon themed maps in doom and learned how that process works. Kinda just spiralled from there and learned how to mod doom.
Then I stopped caring for a decade and then suddenly got back into doom for some reason and then ended up also getting back into marathon and learned how to use like weland and such.
