Thus was it written, and thus shall it be, and Marathon shall come to the iPad of thee!
It shall be! IT SHALL BE!
How do we know this? Because the angels at Bungie told us! In a blog post/interview with the developer who ported the project, Bungie said that Marathon for iPad will released shortly!
Marathon, for those wondering why in the heck we have wandered to far off the reservation that we can’t even see the lights from the casino, was an early first person shooter (FPS) that was developed exclusively for the Mac by the good folks at Bungie.
It was released in 1994, and it was a contemporary of the game Doom, though debates have raged for more than 15 years as to which game is better (Hint: it’s subjective, and no longer matters — the important part is that Marathon was an awesome game at a time when few and fewer games came to the Mac).
In the interview with Daniel Blezek, the developer said that he began working on an iPad port for the game shortly after the device shipped in early 2010, but that as a labor of love, it took a while to finish.
“The Marathon source code was released to the open source community in 1999 and has had 12 years of open source development,” Mr. Blezek said. “Digging into this code base to make the port happen and follow the iOS conventions was a huge effort. On top of that, the code depended on a wide range of libraries that also needed to be ported to the iOS. It was months before the code even built without errors.”
In addition to porting the open source code base, he also had to convert it into a proper iOS game, including new buttons (there is no “quit” in iOS, not to mention a keyboard), and had to work even harder to get the sprite-based game to where it would give a proper 30 frames per second performance on the device.
Bungie strongly hinted the game will be free, but a release date has yet to be announced. Nor are there screenshots available, hence us plopping the Marathon logo onto an iPad in the image above.