: Before the Halo games Bungie was developing a more powerful Marathon engine,
: but instead of more Marathon games they decided to make the Myth games.
: https://marathon.bungie.org/story/newmar-apr98.html#Marathon3
: I'd say the Marathon engine has more in common with the Doom 3 engine rather
: than the Quake or Halo CE engines.
: Quake and Halo CE use potentially visible set while Doom 3 uses Portal
: rendering.
Bit of a recent lurker but first time poster since this month old thread caught my eye. Since this has been a torturous obsession as of recent as what you're talking about almost did happen, with more to it than just vague utterances from Bungie. So I'll just throw this out there for the sake of it: There sorta was an attempt back in the 90s post M∞ under Greg Kirkpatrick's studio "Double Aught" to make a fully 3d marathon-like quake competitor, titled Duality. While it wasn't Marathon in name or setting it certainly looked to have the spirit of it judging from game screenshots, vague plot concepts and the engine's planned features (which included the concept of portal rendering, and of course true 3D). There's a ton more physical documentation on this as opposed to the ill fated "Bungie M3," including engine screenshots. Hamish even has the old site pages of the game backed up on the story page here.
In Reddit AMAs a while back Greg brought up that he still has all the files from his time at Double Aught. Which implies builds of the game engine and game itself. Older story page posts go as far back as old devs talking about their experience working on it as well. Along with a few small asks from other people to hand the stuff over back when the game was freshly dead just for the sake of archival purposes. Since one of the ex employees of the company said they had a working openGL build of the game apparently, along with some vague utterances of the game's map editor actually leaking out at some point or some closed demo play-testing or leak. But these latter parts sound way too fraudulent to be real imo or maybe I'm reading into old forum posts way too hard and it's making my head spin.
I would personally love to see it get unearthed at some point, however it doesn't really seems possible if the people who have contacted Greg over the years over it are any indication. Then again I still don't think we've gotten a definitive "no" on it, more-so that it's just unlikely according to Greg himself. I'd like to contact him sometime myself, just to get some finality on this totally legitimate "issue" of this "missing game" that's an unfortunate driving obsession of mine (I was born a few years after the game died anyways, isn't this an absurd obsession to have!? I dug as far as finding Randy Reddig's earliest texture sets for the game over at the Wayback machine like c'mon!!), however I really wouldn't know where to look for that even though others have found his contact info in the past.
