In early 2020, when I saw that that "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" was available with my Xbox Game Pass subscription that I had on my PC, I thought it might have been the time to try out this whole "Halo" game thing before Halo Infinite is released.
Before that, some context as to why I actively avoided playing any Halo games for so many years.
My introduction to computers and software development was on the Macintosh computers, and so that's also where I played my computer games. The number of games available on the Mac was quite limited compared to PCs, and even fewer "Mac exclusive games" were available.
The Marathon game by Bungie was one of those exclusives. It was a First Person Shooter for the Mac released in December 1994, a year after DOOM, which wouldn't be available on the Mac until summer 1995. Its sequel, "Marathon 2: Durandal", released in November 1995, was first released for Mac, but also got eventually ported to PC and even the Pippin console. Nowadays, it is available on the Xbox, while Classic Marathon is now on Steam. The final sequel, Marathon Infinity, was bundled with the map editor named "Forge".
In 1999, the Marathon 2 engine was open sourced, named Aleph One. A year later I contributed to that project by enabling a few multiplayer modes that were left half-implemented in its code. It was my first open source project contribution; You can find my notes in the project here: Benad_Netgame_Docs/Read Me.
I'm mentioning this because, for me, not having played any of the Halo games, the nostalgia effect I get from playing them instead come from the countless references to Marathon in the Halo games. The Reclaimer symbol that looks like the Marathon logo, the "skull" collectible that looks like the ball item from the Marathon 2 multiplayer mode I worked on, the map editor still named Forge, I could go on.
Published on March 29, 2024 at 15:35 EDT
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