Marathon 3rd Party Scenarios - Part 1 (Requires Aleph One) addon

World's Ultimate Bungie Software Marathon Maps Collection

(Bungie's Myth ultimate collection, from the same source, is here.)

This “for all time” Marathon archive is from a hard drive purchased at the estate sale of a man who died early May 2023. I was always a fan of the Bungie Software game series Marathon, so I was delighted to connect the drive and find lots of cool apps and files, along with a folder named “The Marathon Maps”.

After examining the maps collection, it was clear that all these Marathon maps and files were curated since the release of the original Marathon 1 app, which was December 1994. Yes, the old man who owned the hard drive collected almost every Marathon map ever made.

And the big difference in what he's done is the fact that all folders, Read Mes, and maps are professionally named and organized: no cryptic, uninformative, or baffling titles, and no separated Read Mes. Plus, all Read Mes are cleanly formatted in the header, with date, author, and map name.

(If you're mega-impatient, you can click here to see the whole Marathon archive, or click the standard IA link "SHOW ALL".)

To my knowledge there is no other source currently online for this vast library of Marathon map releases. The total number of individual map folders for the Bungie Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity trilogy alone is 2,741 and the grand total of individual maps in those folders shoots past 10,000. Wow. So if you add all the 3rd party stuff, this page has possibly the most complete set of Marathon game maps and files available since God.

You'll have lots to explore. Be aware that none of the uploaded archives contain Bungie apps or other forms of commercial software. It's just yesteryear's maps and files usable by the modern Marathon multi-platform game engine Aleph One (see below) or even Bungie's decades-old macOS apps, if you dare go backward.

What's covered here:

• Marathon 1 (mostly just called “Marathon”)
• Marathon 2
• Marathon Infinity
• Marathon Evil
• Marathon Evil Hi-Res Walls
• Marathon Tempus Irae
• Marathon Tempus Irae Hi-Res Walls
• Marathon Rubicon X
• Marathon Portal of Sigma
• Marathon EMR
• Marathon RED
• Marathon 3rd Party Scenarios (Needs Fresh Aleph One for Each)

There are even a couple of Marathon Bridges & Balconies maps, for the intrepid.

The excellent 3rd party Marathon scenarios and demos available here include Arx Immanis, Marathon Phoenix, Vacation in Vilcabamba, Los Disneys, Marathon Pfh'Joueur, Bio-Tek Kitchen (Australian International Art Exhibit/Installation), Blood of Bin Laden, and perhaps the coolest, most professional Marathon-based scenario ever made, Blauwe Vingers (includes the English language translation file, already installed--- see the Blauwe Vingers Read Me). Thirty-pfhor excellent 3rd party scenarios, in total.

(For these 3rd party scenarios you'll need a fresh copy of Aleph One, for each. Just drop a new Aleph One app into the folder of the scenario you want to play, and you are ready to go. No conversions, installs, or other hoop-jumping necessary.)

Fresh Copies of Aleph One:
Github.com

Perhaps 99% of the map folders in these archives contain the individual author's original maps and Read Me files, totally intact. The Read Mes are almost all saved in RTF, but a few use the RTFD format.

All map folders have a rotator file (.rot) that shows a cool, navigable 3D wireframe preview of the map or maps enclosed. If you are not familiar with Craig Kloeden's excellent Rotator app, it's available in many OS versions. You'll need a copy of the Rotator app to open these very useful .rot files, or some other app that performs a similar function. Current version of Rotator is 6.0.6 and it works extremely well: highly configurable to taste; use your keyboard's "i" key to access line width and other stuff. Rotator will also save the screen width and height of your choice.

Rotator:
Treefish.com

FYI, rotator files are super-great, but not at all required to enjoy any aspect of this Marathon archive. Also, rotator files were created using the 1998 macOS9 app Map Exporter 3.5 by Loren Petrich.

This collection's individual Read Me files often contain reviews from Bungie's own “The Marathon Archives” site. There are additionally some modern reviews and notes at times, from an unknown Admin. Many to most of these Marathon maps were converted and improved in unexplained ways (usually related to liquid movement and sound) for use in Aleph One. In the Marathon 1 archive, the curator apparently used Raul Bonilla's M1A1 conversion kit. However, all original versions of the M1 maps remain separately intact, and all original Marathon 1 maps will open directly in regular non-Bonilla versions of Aleph One.

Lastly, feathered into this collection are files and folders that clearly came from the venerable Marathon Orphanage page, processed to actually work when possible. Add to that, a list of every known Marathon map author, across every known Marathon version or map, consolidated into a text file. Names in lights, as it goes.

Enjoy this vast Marathon maps archive. Note that I am merely uploading so others can have the possibly most complete Marathon map collection, ever.

Understand that I have no ownership of these folders or files, and no responsibility for their stability or content. Meanwhile, do with these maps as you wish. Post them wherever. Stare at them lovingly. Send the original authors approving e-mails if you like their work, fully expecting it to bounce after all these long, lonely years...

Here's a list of collection content. It's not really meant to be read and studied, unless you want to. Mostly it's for people haunting a search engine for a single map they've been looking for. Stuff like that.

P.S. Banner illustration by Italian artist JKHP, created for Marathon's 2004 10-year anniversary.