- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I'm really excited to hear that Marathon is coming to XBLA mostly because I think the game never got the respect it deserved. Marathon was ahead of its time and many features that first appeared in Marathon are still around to today in games like Halo. I think we should make a list of the things that made Marathon so great and that helped push the FPS genre into the modern age.
I'll start:
1) Campaign coop
2) Multiplayer specific maps
3) Multiplayer gametypes beyond straight-up deathmatch
Halo's "Oddball" was Marathon's "Kill the man with the ball" and Marathon also had "King of the Hill"
4) A deep story
5) Aiming in both the x and y axis (Doom at the time only had x-axis aiming)
6) A physics engine (rudimentary by today's standards but hitting a dude with a rocket would cause his body to get blown across the map)
There were also things that Marathon did that never really caught on:
1) No aiming reticule
2) No jumping
3) The option to spawn in monsters to multiplayer games (sort of like trying to player Lockdown with a bunch of elites running around)