The original Marathon games from Bungie are coming to Steam, and will be available to download for free, the developer behind Destiny 2 announced Friday. The first game in the first-person shooter franchise is available now in the form of Classic Marathon. Sequels Classic Marathon 2 and Classic Marathon Infinity are listed as “coming soon” on Steam.
Bungie credits the Aleph One community of open-source developers with bringing the classic Marathon trilogy to Steam. Aleph One supports the original Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and Marathon Infinity as part of the open source project, which is available to download through its official website.
The Steam versions of the classic Marathon trilogy will support both Mac and Windows PC. Its open-source authors promise “authentic gameplay” with modern conveniences: optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60 fps interpolation.
Bungie has a new take on Marathon in the works for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The new Marathon will be a player-versus-player, team-based extraction shooter in which squads of cybernetic Runners compete to retrieve artifacts, implants, and weapons from a hostile environment. After revealing the game a year ago, Bungie said it planned to go dark “for an extended period” until such time as it’s ready to show actual gameplay from the new Marathon.
For now, you can catch up on the original trilogy at no cost. No doubt Bungie will stuff the new Marathon with references to the old ones, should you want to brush up on your lore.
