Marathon 2

From Traxus

Marathon 2: Durandal (commonly shortened to "Marathon 2") is the second game in the Marathon trilogy and was shipped November 24, 1995[1]. The full contents of the trilogy were released to the public as a part of the Trilogy Release and can be played for free with Aleph One.

Contents 1 Overview 2 The Engine 3 The Levels 4 Windows port 5 Translations 6 See also 7 External links

Overview

The Engine

With Marathon 2, Bungie gave the Marathon engine a complete overhaul. Although the basic gameplay remained the same, M2 added many new features as well as minor tweaks and fixes. For an attempt at a list of the most significant changes, see Engine differences between Marathon and Marathon 2.

Bungie also licensed the engine (in both Macintosh and Windows formats) out to other developers for use in commercial games. This ultimately led to the creation of Prime Target, ZPC, Damage Incorporated, and Wheels, though not necessarily in that order.

In 2000, Bungie released Marathon 2's source code to the public under the GNU General Public License. Soon afterwards, fans banded together to establish the Aleph One project, eventually establishing a single cross-platform engine able to run all three Marathon games.

The Levels

I		Lh'owon
	1	Waterloo Waterpark
	2	The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune
	3	Charon Doesn't Make Change
II		Volunteers
	4	What About Bob?
	5	Come and Take Your Medicine
	6	We're Everywhere
III		Garrison
	7	Ex Cathedra
	8	Nuke and Pave
	9	Curiouser and Curiouser
IV		Citadel
	10	Eat It, Vid Boi!
	11	The Hard Stuff Rules...
	12	Bob's Big Date
	13	Six Thousand Feet Under
V		Durandal
	14	If I Had a Rocket Launcher, I'd Make Somebody Pay
	15	Sorry Don't Make It So
	16	For Carnage, Apply Within
	17	Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!
VI		Captured
	18	The Big House
VII		Blake
	19	This Side Toward Enemy
	20	God Will Sort the Dead...
	21	My Own Private Thermopylae
	22	Kill Your Television
VIII		Simulacrums
	23	Where the Twist Flops
	24	Beware of Abandoned Rental Trucks
	25	Requiem for a Cyborg
IX		S'pht'Kr
	26	Fatum Iustum Stultorum
	27	Feel the Noise
	28	All Roads Lead to Sol...

Windows port

In 1996, Bungie released a port of Marathon 2 for Windows computers. It can be downloaded from here (under "Marathon 2 for Windows"), thanks to the Trilogy Release. Illustrations of the major changes in the Windows version can be found here; we've also attempted to document some of the major changes on this site under Waterloo Waterpark and Charon Doesn't Make Change.

The port was largely forgotten after Aleph One was ported to Windows in 2000, allowing Windows users to run the original Macintosh versions of all three games.

Translations

Marathon 2 may have been originally released in Spanish and German, and possibly other languages, in addition to English.[2]

In 2007, Microsoft published an Xbox 360 port of Marathon 2 which included full translations of all terminal messages into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean; with all translations made new for the port by a Microsoft localization team rather than using any existing versions.[3] However, as of 2008 none of the translations have yet been transcribed and repackaged for computer players, and no information has been released on whether Microsoft and Bungie would approve of such a project.

See also

• Super Marathon, a combined port of Marathon and Marathon 2 to the Bandai Pippin game console.
• Marathon: Durandal, a port of Marathon 2 to the Xbox 360 game console.

External links

• The official Marathon Series website by Bungie Studios, including original concept art from Marathon 2's development.
• arrival.bungie.org, a website housing an early story outline for the game, as well as an early list of proposed BoB dialogue lines. The site requires a username and password to enter, which Bungie.org released in 2000 as the the Seven Glyphs puzzle on their front page.