Marathon's 90s Revival: A Retro-Futuristic Fever Dream in Gaming
In the mid-1990s, as a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our multiplayer shooter of choice. Working on Apple Macs rather than PCs, Bungie's sci-fi opus stood out as one of the few networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of each day, staff from various magazines across the company would load it up and engage in hours of gameplay, often with the pulsating beats of Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo. This era marked a pivotal moment when video games began to intertwine with club culture, with Sony enlisting the legendary Sheffield studio, the Designers Republic, for box art and licensing the latest dance tunes for marketing and soundtracks.
A Nostalgic Journey Back to Cyberpunk Roots
Western developers were captivated by cyberpunk anime, newly accessible through distributors like Viz Media and Manga Entertainment, while the internet emerged as a bizarre and wild global meeting place. For a time, it felt as if we were living within the pages of a William Gibson novel. These memories come flooding back while playing the new version of Marathon, released this week by Bungie and heavily inspired by 1990s futurism. The game has evolved into an online sci-fi extraction shooter where players beam down to the planet Tau Ceti IV to scavenge for loot, complete missions, and potentially engage in combat with others.
Its closest competitor is Arc Raiders, which similarly employs stylised retro-futurism. In a recent Twitter exchange, Bungie's global franchise director, Philip Asher, cited Sony's Wipeout game, its Mental Wealth ads for PlayStation, and its translucent Dual Shock controllers as key inspirations. And indeed, he is not exaggerating. Upon loading the new game, players are immediately assaulted by discordant digital synth noises, Day-Glo-style colours, and warped pixelated images. Character models, with their spiked helmets and fluorescent gloves, resemble 90s ravers, while the load-out screen presents a fever dream of retro fonts and peculiar icons.
An Aesthetic Commitment to 90s Cyberpunk
Loading the game immerses players in distorted videos of moths crawling over robotic faces, creating an initial sense of near-incomprehensibility. However, as one settles into the kinetic hyper-rush of glitching images, a wave of nostalgia and admiration takes over. This nostalgia is for the era the game so perfectly evokes—a specific period when films like Johnny Mnemonic and Ghost in the Shell propelled cyberpunk visual language into mainstream consciousness, when authors such as Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson were widely read, and when every video game advertisement seemed ripped from the world of Blade Runner.
Bungie's unwavering commitment to this aesthetic is truly admirable. The menus are crammed with ASCII text and animating images reminiscent of old HTML websites, a theme that extends to the visual signs and systems within the game's environments. The fiction of the universe is rich with psychotic mega crops and anarchist hackers, while a very particular, stately serif font—similar to Century Old Style used in many Japanese games of the 90s—adds to the authenticity. On Tau Ceti IV, every UESC building features boxy computer displays scrolling green text read-outs, and architectural elements often resemble giant MiniDisc players.
A Bold Gambit in a Competitive Gaming Landscape
Over the past five years, the gaming industry and wider pop culture have become accustomed to homogenised aesthetics—a dash of cartoonish charm here, a hint of dystopian sci-fi bleakness there, all designed to avoid disorienting a mass user-base. Marathon, however, unapologetically injects its influences straight into players' eyeballs. This is a brave gambit, especially given the recent shutdowns of numerous online shooters like Concord, XDefiant, and Highguard, which were often iterated over months or years and user-tested to death.
Entering the most competitive game genres with such an uncompromising vision is, to many, wildly optimistic. Yet, perhaps this is the most nostalgic element of the Marathon enterprise. The 1990s felt like a time when the future was cracking open—electronic dance music was exploding, PlayStation was advertised as an alien artefact of immense technological power, the internet was fun and felt collectively owned. Returning to Marathon now, 30 years later, in a games industry that seems far less certain of itself, is weirdly poignant.
The new version's story revolves around technological relics left behind by a once advanced and optimistic civilisation, a narrative that feels unnervingly relevant, timely, and even sad. As we navigate this retro-futuristic fever dream, it serves as a powerful reminder of a bygone era's boldness and creativity, challenging modern gaming norms with its distinctive and evocative style.
