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Marathon: Resurrection Q&A
July 23, 2007 | Cord Kruse | |
In 1994 Bungie Studios released Marathon, a first person shooter which built upon the lessons the company had learned from its previous success with Pathways To Darkness. Set aboard the UESC Marathon, a starship hurtling through the lonely void, players were thrust into the role of a lone warrior fighting off an alien boarding party. The game featured networked play, full 3D movement, and state of the art graphics for the time. It wasn't long before the combination of solid gameplay and compelling storyline gave Marathon a loyal and dedicated following, and led to two successful sequels.Now that Bungie has moved on to new ownership, and the alien fighting baton has been passed to Halo's Master Chief, it would seem likely that Marathon would fade into relative obscurity. Likely, that is, if not for the legions of die hard fans keeping the game and story alive with internet discussion, fan fiction, fan art, and modules for newer FPS games. One such mod, Marathon: Resurrection, is now released after nearly seven years of hard work by Team Unpfhorgiven. An ambitious project, Resurrection recreates the original Marathon using the Unreal Tournament engine. It introduces new versions of the monsters, weapons, and player skins of the original, as well as remastered music, high resolution textures, and new chapter screens. Both the single and multiplayer experience are covered in Resurrection, giving longtime fans and newcomer's alike the chance to revisit to the game that started it all. IMG's Cord Kruse recently had the chance ask Marathon: Resurrection's Project Coordinator, Marian "Tycho" Zamfirescu, a few questions about the project and the dedicated volunteers and fans who made it possible.IMG: For those who are unaware of the project, what is Marathon: Resurrection? Tycho: Marathon:Resurrection is a modification/total conversion for the original Unreal Tournament, with the goal of bringing the original classic to a new game engine that allowed for a richer single player experience of such a great game, while also incorporating true multi- player over IP play, and to make it available to greater gaming platform than just the original Mac only Marathon, since UT is available for Mac as well as PC. IMG: What sorts of updates to graphics, weapons, physics, and levels have been introduced in Resurrection? Tycho: Basically, almost everything was re-done from scratch. The only actual game content that was re-used was the story (told through the terminal text) and many of the sound effects in the game, but outside of that, everything from player model to monsters to weapons, levels, textures, music has been painstakingly re-created for true 3D. It truly is a Total Conversion. IMG: How closely does the look of the game match the original? Tycho: It varies throughout the game. Some things are quite close replicas, things that we felt were identifiably "Marathon" like Pattern Buffers and Terminals for example, or the actual color scheme of the Pfhor, door textures and things of that nature. Other things are very different from the original, things that we felt were needed in order to strike a balance between the fact that while this is Marathon, it is in fact being played in Unreal Tournament. It's a fine and oftentimes difficult balance to keep in mind the traditional Marathon player as well as the traditional UT player, as they have very different expectations and we wanted either of those two to actually feel comfortable playing Marathon:Resurrection. The big changes we made would be things like the monster AI, their behaviour in the maps, many areas where lighting has been improved in levels, many environment textures and such and absolutely every single monster model. These are things we felt were necessary things to do to really bring what we hoped would be an improvement. We didn't want to simply do a replica of Marathon, we wanted to give it new life.
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