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Comment by rzt | Hacker News Reader

I was a Mac kid, so my world was Marathon, but I think a lot of the lessons are the same. I remember building my own custom worlds, really screwing up the physics, and then deleting en masse.

Whenever I play shooters now, I still think, "Man, I should just get a copy of Doom and play that instead." Too much noise in some of these games –– I just want to blow stuff up.

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I preferred Marathon a lot over Doom. Some reviewers have called it "the thinking man's" shoot-em-up and I think this holds some truth. Of couse Marathon was released almost a year after Doom's release, so Bungie had plenty of time to improve the genre in many areas. Not just in looking up and down, the game also featured:

- weapons with multiple modes and reload mechanics

- advanced lightning effects

- "5D" space (one of the multiplayer levels used this)

- physics (e.g. grenade hopping and missile ballistics)

- neutral and allied npc's

- more varied elevator / switches system (e.g. in the "Colony Ship For Sale Cheap" level)

- motion tracker in UI

- nifty level mechanics, like the levels without air (e.g. "G4 Sunbathing")

I still wonder if Jason Jones could have become an equal to Carmack if he kept his focus on coding games ...

Another Marathon guy here. Spent some summers ago just playing the first two games through, they're still great. I especially like the music. The Marathon community is still alive with AlephOne (http://marathon.sourceforge.net/), an open source port of the Marathon engine, with multiplayer support.

I also played Marathon. I still occasionally hear the alien chatter. The way you could aim up and down was something that made Marathon way better for me - especially in multiplayer.

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