Bungie Software's latest offering, Marathon, is taking the Macintosh game market by storm. Announced at Macworld San Francisco over a year ago, Marathon went through a turbulent development cycle with many re-writes and delays but not many could argue about its end result. Inside Mac Games recently talked to Alexander Seropian, Bungie Software's President, and Jason Jones, Lead Programmer and the mastermind behind Marathon.
IMG: Pathways had manual look-up copy protection but Marathon doesn’t. What made you change your mind?
Seropian: Yea, Pathways was a little bit annoying. Copy protection is an issue that is heavily debated online as to whether you buy something you have to unlock it everytime you want to use it. Marathon was a much easier call, there are a couple of factors that went into our decision. One, is that it’s a network game and we can protect it with serial numbers. I don’t think anyone would argue that its a hindrance for the user because it’s a blind look up, so that gives us a little protection there. And also, because we really didn’t have time (laughing). Not that we were really planning on doing it. I think the general consciences around here was we didn’t want to do it. We knew we were going to sell a lot of Marathon anyways...so basically that’s why it’s not there.
IMG: Looking back, do you think the leaked beta hurt your company and do you plan on doing anything different with your next game to prevent this from this happening again?
Seropian: Ah, the Leaked Beta! It really wasn’t all that devastating, it was very annoying. There was a serious lack of professionalism on some people’s part that caused that to happen. The real result, though, was probably positive. We had a lot potential customers dying to have a look at Marathon, and the beta did provide that. Although it completely didn’t do it on our terms or our schedule and it didn’t show them what we wanted them to see, which was bad. If you look at the demo versus what the beta looks like, you can tell. The demo is fairly polished compared to the beta.
We’re definitely going to do things differently next time. Whenever we release betas now we’ll have the user’s name hardcoded in it, and that should prevent people from spreading it around.
IMG: At Macworld Boston (in early August) you told people Marathon would ship in 2 weeks and that you were just waiting on the boxes. So what happened?
Seropian:
 
IMG: The Marathon box is quiet a piece of work. How important do you think an attractive game box is to the success of a product?
Seropian: Extremely. When you buy software, it’s really two things. There’s the intellectual property, which is the real value of the software. But in the real world, you just can’t go around selling a disk despite how good the game might be.
Computer games have two incarnations, there’s the physical media, which is the packaging, manual, and kind of the experience. And then there’s the intellectual property, which is the game itself. We value each incarnation of our product as equally important. It definitely pays off in the end because a lot of customers go to stores not knowing what they want and having an attractive package makes a big difference.
IMG: You’ve taken a lot of hits on the online services about the delays in shipping Marathon, the box fiasco, and other gripes people have. Would you say that’s a sign of growing pains your company is going through?
Seropian:
 
IMG: What did you learn most about Pathways and how did you incorporate that into Marathon.
Jones: Besides all the technical stuff I learned from Pathways, I think the most important lesson we learned from Pathways from a development standpoint was that the game started out too hard. It was hard to get into, and it wasn’t that interesting in the beginning compared to the end. People that would start out playing would often give up because it was too hard.
What we tried to do in Marathon is a much smaller learning curve. Our game that came out before Pathways, Minotaur, was even worse than Pathways. It took a very long time to get into Minotaur, unless you were part of the D&D crowd who saw its potential immediately.
I realize that we still didn’t do as well as we could in Marathon. The first levels in Marathon aren’t as good as the later ones, they aren’t as well thought out. The geometry isn’t as good, they’re sort of boring, and the monsters aren’t that exciting. Also the writing in the beginning isn’t as good as the writing in the end. But I think Marathon is much more open to first time users than Pathways was.
IMG: Looking back now, what do you think of Pathways?
Jones:
 
IMG: Can you explain what orthogonal is and how it applies to Marathon?
Jones: Orthogonal means that something joins at a right angle. If you look at Pathways, even though Pathways had rounded corners and it had 45 degree angled walls, its world was essentially orthogonal which meant it was all based on a right angle grid. Orthogonal just means 90 degrees.
That isn’t used in Marathon at all because Marathon lets you place walls at whatever angle you want, however long you want. Whereas in Pathways everytime you wanted to have a corner, it had to be 90 degrees, in Marathon you can do whatever you want. You can even make curves if you put a lot of short line segments next to each other.
IMG: What would you say was the most difficult aspect in developing Marathon?
Jones:
 
IMG: I’ve heard rumors that Marathon would have shipped months ago if it hadn’t been for all the wasted hours play-testing net Marathon. Any truth to this?
Jones: Yea, I’m sure there’s some truth to it. But also, all that playing that we did helped work out a lot of the bugs. In the shipping version there were some problems, but very few of them. What we ended up after a lot of that testing was a very stable game engine. It’s definitely true that we got hooked on the net Marathon early and a lot of the work we did on the game after we started playing net was more biased toward net play than solo play. That definitely did slow down development of the game but it also made the net game a lot better and it also made improvements in the solo game as well. But yes, if we hadn’t played the network game so much it probably would have been done a month before the actual release.
IMG: The art in Marathon is dramatically different and much better than in Pathways. What did you do to improve on the art?
Jones:
 
IMG: Are you planning on porting Marathon to any other platform.
Jones: Well,I can’t talk about that. Obviously it would be a great opportunity, especially with the new Sega Saturn and Sony PSX. We’ll see.
IMG: Will Bungie release a level editor?
Jones:
 
IMG: Why do you think people are so attracted to first person perspective shoot’em up games like Marathon and what does that say about our society?
Jones:
 
IMG: Do you think a few years from now we’ll still be playing games like Marathon and DOOM or is this just a craze?
Jones: Yes, I think it’s a fad. You are going to see a bunch of these games come out on the PC and Mac. But they are definitely going to stay, they are definitely cool but people are going to get tired of them and something new will come out. But I don’t think you can beat their simplicity, I think they’ll be around for a while.
IMG: What’s missing in the release of Marathon that you plan on incorporating in future versions of Marathon?
Jones:
 
IMG: When can we expect the ARA patch?
Jones: The ARA patch is almost done. There’s going to be one patch that will fix the known bugs in the release version. Everything is done but ARA which is in testing, but it should be out soon.
IMG: How does Marathon compare to DOOM?
Jones: DOOM probably has better graphics, but we have a better physics model, I think. Our networking is a lot more fun. DOOM is probably faster because of the PC hardware and has more of an arcade feel to it than Marathon does because of the story we have in the game.
IMG: Why aren’t there any secret codes or many secret doors in Marathon?
Jones: There are no secret codes in Marathon. Why? Well, for example, if you’re stuck on G4 Sunbathing and you’re trying to find the switch to get off the level and if you know you can just type control-aslag three times to get 3 times health and get the Rocket Launcher, it becomes really tempting to do that everytime. Marathon actually has built-in cheating, you can always switch the difficulty levels.
But I didn’t want to give people an easy way out. If you have that in the back of your mind, the game actually plays different. I’m sure some people don’t like that but I really wanted to give people the opportunity to be a little bit more honest when they were playing the game.
There are a lot of secret doors, there are a whole bunch of secret terminals, secret weapons caches, stuff like that. I’ve actually been surprised, very few people on the Internet have found any of them. On the last level there’s a message from us and a secret save terminal which I don’t think people have found yet.
There is one bug in the game which is kind of a secret Vid-Master cheat that you can even use in the game network game. It was just an oversight.
IMG: So what’s the cheat?
Jones: I’m not going to tell you (laughing), because you (pointing to me) can use it in the network game.