Have You Played… The Marathon Trilogy?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

While DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D are known throughout the world as the original murder simulators, other shooters that followed were content to quietly improve the genre. Marathon was one of them.

Originally released on the Macintosh in 1994 it saw two quick sequels in the following years. Whereas DOOM MAN and Blazkowicz were happy to shoot everything because they looked bad, the security officer of Marathon actually had a story to follow, as told by computer logs – an AI going wrong, an invading alien force, a slave uprising from within your enemy’s own ranks... sound familiar?

That's because seven years later the developers of Marathon would change the whole FPS landscape again with a very similar story - a wee game called Halo. In the meantime, Marathon has become a respected link in the evolution of first-person shooters. And you can play the open source version of the whole trilogy for free. As far as history lessons go, you could do much worse.