Happy Holidays from the Aleph One development community.

You might not have your head wrapped around the Holiday Season just yet, but the Aleph One development community is ready to drop some season's greetings on your unaware, slack-jawed face! Out of nowhere, they've just announced a new version of the Aleph One engine that not only makes playing Marathon a breeze on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms, but also brings it up to date with the most modern bells and whistles.

Read on for the full press release, and hit the link below to travel back in time to a distant future where space-docking was novel, rampancy was in its infancy, and the only good Bob was a dead Bob.

Bungie's Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity; polished, packaged and ready for download with the brand new Aleph One 1.0 engine.

December 1, 2011 - The Aleph One development community is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Since the release of the Marathon 2 source code, the team has worked diligently to deliver a cross platform game engine capable of bringing the classic Marathon games, as well as fan-made modifications to the modern Mac, Windows PC and Linux platforms.

Aleph One, an open source project, enhances Bungie's original Marathon games with modern OpenGL shader support, Internet co-op and multiplayer, modern mouse-look and gamepad support and plugin support for modifications.

To celebrate the 12 year development of Aleph One, the original Marathon games have been upgraded to take advantage of the new engine features.

• Marathon has been updated with a modern HUD, high resolution graphics as well as extensive changes to the scenario to create the most authentic Marathon experience since 1994.
• Marathon 2: Durandal has been updated with the high resolution graphics previously only available for the Xbox LIVE Arcade game.
• Marathon Infinity has been updated with high resolution graphics.

Halo 1 PC/Mac, and Marathon 2 XBLA players rejoice!

If you missed the news in the Weekly Update, (scroll down to the section with the orange block of game UI), players of classic Bungie games get a head start on making their Reach lobby appearance shiny by unlocking some special nameplate images.

Two of these need a few extra clicks on your part to become active, so we're letting you get started now - Halo 1 for PC/Mac, and Marathon 2: Durandal for XBLA. To unlock these emblems:

1. Make sure you're signed in to Bungie.net with the account that's linked to the gamertag you want to tie your Halo PC key to. If you tie it to one account, but only played Halo 2 and 3 on a different account, we CAN NOT help you combine them later to get the emblem for playing all 3. Choose wisely! Obviously, this also has to be the gamertag you'll play Reach with.

2. Visit your Bungie.net account page , then click the Game Settings tab, then the Nameplate Settings link below that.

3. Follow the instruction there to unlock your stuff!

4. Wait an agonizingly long 20 days until 9/14 when you get Reach and play it online

5. Return to the same Nameplate Settings page , where you'll be shown all the nameplates available to you, and you can choose one to use. Return there whenever you feel like changing things up.

6. Questions? Problems? Post here

Download the limited-time only Bungie Day '08 Themes and Gamerpics on Xbox Live Marketplace now.

Download those seven Gamerpics on Xbox Live Marketplace now. The Bungie Day '08 Theme and Gamerpics will only be available on Bungie Day only. Get 'em while you can.