Bungie's pre-Halo FPS Classic Marathon Infinity just launched on Steam for free, meaning you can now

Old timey FPS has just landed on Steam, meaning you can now play all three Classic Marathon games via Valve's distribution service for free.

Originally released in 1996 (without the word 'Classic' in its title) jinda44 Marathon Infinity was the last and largest game in Bungie's pre-Halo FPS series. Its "Blood Tides of Lh'owon" campaign, which could be played either solo or cooperatively, offered 20 levels that included new enemies to fight and weapons to fight them with, as any FPS sequel demands.

The release of Classic Marathon Infinity represents the end of Aleph One Developers' project to bring the Marathon Trilogy to Steam. The team is named after its community developed open source engine based on the source code for Marathon 2, which Bungie released for free before Microsoft acquired the company at the turn of the Millennium. It's a similar deal to what did for Star Wars: Dark Forces, before Nightdive released their own, for Lucasarts' classic, anyway.

In any case, The Aleph One team has rebuilt the three Marathon games in this homebrew engine, releasing them across the course of this year (which happens to be the original Marathon's 30th anniversary). The reconstructed version of that game in May, while hit the service last month.

All of this has happened with the full approval of Bungie, who "We're very supportive of the Marathon community and Aleph One's dedication here to bring the original Marathon to PC, Linux, and Mac for everyone to experience, with cross-platform play available in multiplayer. This is a true tribute to the original game!"

Classic Marathon Infinity [STEAM TRAILER] - YouTube

Alongside simply making the games run on PC, the Aleph One rebuilds also provide optional support for widescreen HUDs, 3D filtering/perspective, e19 positional audio, and 60+fps interpolation. "Just in case the original is too authentic", the Steam page for Infinity wryly comments.

The Marathon Games are a real blind spot in my FPS education, as they were all originally released for Mac. Indeed, the Steam release marks the trilogy's first official appearance on Windows at all. It's worth noting, however, that all three games have been available via the Aleph One website . The site is also out if you play all three games and still find yourself hungry for more, as it includes several community-made scenarios for the games.

Although the Aleph One team's project is complete, this (probably) won't be the last we hear about Marathon. Bungie is currently working on a in the series, reimagined as a PvP extraction shooter. This was originally scheduled to release this year, but both the game and Bungie have endured a turbulent time of late. The Marathon project saw a change of leadership, with former Valorant game directly Joe Ziegler taking the helm. 

Meanwhile, in July Bungie announced that 220 employees were being following the launch of Destiny 2: betdog The Final Shape, a move that met with of CEO Pete Parsons from former employees. Assuming this upheaval hasn't further affected Bungie's new Marathon project, however, the game is now scheduled to launch sometime in 2025.