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Folks, I’ll be frank with you: I don’t like what Bungie’s doing with Marathon. Well, that’s an understatement of the situation that doesn’t have that much to do with the ongoing plagiarism situation, but it’s the truth. Years before Bungie ever announced that its grand revival of Marathon would turn the franchise into an honest-to-goodness live-service looter-shooter platform, I believed that the franchise deserved a DOOM 2016-tier revival. That’s not going to happen, of course, but it should’ve.
Since a proper remake of Pathways Into Darkness and Marathon isn’t happening, then, old farts such as myself have to look elsewhere for their old-school alien brutality bonanza, and that’s where mods such as Apotheosis X come into the picture.
Apotheosis X is easily the best mod I have ever played for Marathon. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that it’s the best mod I’ve ever played for a video game, bar none, but that list is long and I don’t feel like parsing through it all that deeply.
The important bits and bobs are simple, though: this project is a love letter to Marathon proper that celebrates absolutely all of its best features. At the same time, the core gameplay loop is elevated to the very limits of what the engine will allow through high-grade assets, complex map-work, and a pandemonium of AI chomping at each others’ necks. It’s a joy, truly. You should play Apotheosis X, too, and if a sheer recommendation is all you needed to get, off you go to its ModDB page to download.
Marathon’s true value isn’t the most obvious thing in the world
Here’s the thing about Marathon: it’s just about the weirdest, most out-there narrative you’ve seen in a video game. If you’re not actively wolfing down its many, many, many monitor lore-dumps and connecting the dots together like you’re Charlie from It’s Always Sunny, it won’t make sense. Given how incredibly dated the official Bungie entries are by now, I won’t blame you if you’re not keen on playing them, and the good news is that you don’t actually have to. Read up on Hamish Sinclair’s delightfully aughts-coded Story website, instead. It’ll do you good.
Why is this important at all in the context of Apotheosis X and nu-Marathon? Because this abject weirdness and the grim, gritty tone of classic Marathon was what set the franchise apart from, say, DOOM. It referenced out-of-context media in a way that made sense, it looped back around itself to make a point, and it wasn’t afraid of delving into genuine existential horror every so often. DOOM didn’t have any of that, and it still doesn’t.
Judging by the pre-release materials Bungie’s shown off for nu-Marathon so far, there’s bits and pieces of the above present still, but they won’t hit the same. Worse, Bungie is all-too-keen to sunset its own painfully-made content if it ends up being “irrelevant” for the game at large. What this means is that even if nu-Marathon ends up being an absolute slam dunk and a new flagship to match Destiny itself, it’s still going to be a live-service game where the community gets no say in what happens to it past its prime. And that’s dreadful.
Do yourself a favor and witness classic Marathon at its absolute best via Apotheosis X
Death of the author is an important thing, I’ve come to realize. Sure, sure, IP rights and all that, but let’s be real for a moment: the best media truly comes into its own when it’s allowed to breathe and exist beyond the scope its creators envisioned for it.
Did anyone at Bungie back in the 1990s expect folks to be talking about that one weird reference to Beowulf, Lethe, translucent blue flames, and splintering of an ancient oak 30 years after the fact? I reckon not. Bungie’s writers have always been great at dropping hints, suggestions, and murky doodads that may or may not be drawn upon down the line. That’s the true reason why the classic Marathon community still talks about these games daily and, indeed, the reason why Apotheosis X exists in the first place.
To circle back to the standalone mod that kickstarted this entire diatribe, Apotheosis X is the single best starting point a new Marathon player could possibly wish for. It has all the highs of Marathon with as few lows as humanly possible, and if it gets you to read up on what’s truly going on in this franchise’s background, all the better.
But hey, who knows! Maybe I’ll eat my words and enjoy nu-Marathon in all its extraction shooter “goodness” in a few years’ time. If that ends up being the case, I’m sure Marathon lore will be all the more relevant. If not, we’ve got standalone offerings from the community, like Apotheosis X, to fall back upon. And that’s a beautiful thing.
