The revival of Bungie's 1990s shooter Marathon, released this week, is an online sci-fi extraction game that channels the era's club culture and cyberpunk influences. Players beam to the planet Tau Ceti IV to scavenge loot, complete missions, and engage in player-versus-player combat. Bungie's global franchise director, Philip Asher, cited Sony's Wipeout, its Mental Wealth ads, and translucent Dual Shock controllers as inspirations.
The game's aesthetic is a deliberate throwback: Day-Glo colours, pixelated images, and discordant digital synth noises greet players immediately. Character models sport spiked helmets and fluorescent gloves, evoking 90s ravers. Menus are crammed with ASCII text and animating images reminiscent of old HTML websites, while environments feature boxy computer displays and green text read-outs. The font is a stately serif similar to the Century Old Style used in many Japanese games of the 90s.
The author, a former Edge magazine staff writer, recalls playing the original Marathon on Apple Macs in the mid-1990s as the multiplayer shooter of choice. The era saw video games embrace club culture, with Sony employing The Designers Republic for box art and licensing dance tracks. The internet was emerging as a wild global meeting place, and cyberpunk anime became widely available. The new Marathon evokes that specific period—a time when Johnny Mnemonic and Ghost in the Shell brought cyberpunk into the mainstream.
Bungie's commitment to this retro-futuristic vision is uncompromising, especially given the recent shutdown of many online shooters such as Concord, XDefiant, and Highguard. The author describes the game's aesthetic as a 'fever dream' that is initially incomprehensible but becomes thrillingly evocative. The fiction is packed with psychotic mega-corporations and anarchist hackers, and the architecture on Tau Ceti IV resembles giant MiniDisc players.
The nostalgic element extends beyond visuals: the 1990s felt like the future was cracking open, with electronic dance music exploding and PlayStation advertised as an alien artefact. The new Marathon's story deals with technological relics left by a once-advanced civilisation, a poignant reflection on the games industry's current uncertainty. The author admires the optimism of launching such a bold vision in a competitive genre.
