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lechevaliermalfet · 6 years

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Pistols at Dawn: A Look at Doom and Marathon

In the mid-1990s, the first-person shooter genre was born with Doom. It wasn't the first game of its type. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold preceded it. Catacomb 3D came before either of those. And you can trace the lineage further back if you like. But it was Doom that saw the kind of runaway success most development studios live and die without ever attaining. That success spawned imitators. It was the imitators and their imitations – some of them using the very same engine – that made it a genre. It's how genres are born.

It was interesting to watch that happen in real time.

But that's the PC side of history.

If you were a Macintosh user, you were probably sick to death of your PC-owning friends crowing about Doom, all the more because it wasn't available for your system of choice. Doom would eventually make its way Mac-ward... after its own sequel was eventually released for the system first. Absurd as this sounds, it didn’t really matter too much. Story, and the importance of continuity between games, wasn't exactly a big concern in Doom.

But Mac users had little reason to despair. Because although Doom was and is rightly remembered as a classic, Mac users were privy to a game nearly as good – probably even equal, maybe even better, depending on who you talk to.

That game was Marathon.

More below the cut.

It's hard trying to justify comparisons between Doom and Marathon, because despite their similarities, they aren't really in the same league. It's hard to compare any game that became the jumping-off point for a whole genre to its contemporaries. But as much as I lionize Doom, and as much as everyone else does the same, it's perhaps helpful to think that this is done with the benefit of hindsight. Today, in 2018, we've had nearly two-and-a-half decades of Doom being available for almost every single thing that could conceivably run it.

Remembering Doom in its time, it would have been hard to predict that it would go on to achieve quite the level of adulation it's garnered over the years. It's not that Doom doesn't deserve it. It's more that any game attaining this level of success both in its time and in the long term is basically impossible to predict. Doom was much talked about, it was wildly popular, you heard rumors of whole IT departments losing days of productivity to it in network games, but... Well, it was just one game. Later two. It was perfectly valid to suppose, in the mid-90s, that some developer would surely supplant it with something even better. That's just the way things worked. It's just that Doom was well-made enough, well-balanced enough, that "something even better" didn't come around for a long time.

Still, the Macintosh is not where I would have expected to look for real competition for Doom.

The Mac wasn't actually a barren wasteland, game-wise. It's just easy to remember it that way, especially if, like me, you grew up playing PC games. Most of the games we think of as being influential in the realm of computer gaming tended not to come from that direction. Mac users made up a smaller portion of overall computer users at that point. PCs (still often referred to as "IBM/PC compatibles" at the time) being the larger market and thus a source of larger potential profits, that was where the majority of developers focused their attention. The hassles of porting a game to Mac, whether handled by the original developer or farmed out to somebody else, were frequently judged not to be worth the potential profit. At times, it was determined not to be profitable in the first place.

There were a few games – Myst comes immediately to mind – that bucked this trend, but most Mac games only became influential once they crossed over to PCs, like... Well, like Myst did. The Mac ecosystem just wasn't big enough for anything that happened in it exclusively to influence the wider world of PC gaming.

Actually, let's go with that ecosystem analogy for a minute.

Mac gaming in the early 90s was sort of like Australia. It's a tiny system that only accounted for a small percentage of the biosphere. It had its own unique creatures, similar to animals occupying equivalent ecological niches elsewhere in the world. But on closer inspection, these turned out to all be very different from their counterparts, often in fundamental ways. And then you had some creatures with no real equivalents elsewhere. There was a lot of parallel evolution.

Case in point: Marathon.

Being released a scant eleven days after Doom, you definitely can't accuse it of being one of the imitators. It didn't happen in a vacuum, though.

Its creators, Bungie, were a sort of oddball company whose founders openly admitted that they started off in the Macintosh market not because of any fervent belief in the superiority of the platform, but because it was far less competitive than the PC market at the time.

They started off with Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a multiplayer-only (more or less) first-person maze game, and followed it up with Pathways Into Darkness.

Pathways was meant to be a sequel to Minotaur at first, until it morphed into its own thing over the course of its development. In genre terms, it's most like a first-person shooter. Except there are heavy adventure game elements, nonlinearity, and multiple endings depending on decisions you make during the game, which are pretty foreign to the genre. It also features a level of resource scarcity that wouldn't be at all out of place in a survival horror game.

Incidentally, I would love to see a source port of Pathways Into Darkness. It is its own weird, awkward beast of a game, and I would dearly love to be able to play it, after having seen only maybe ten minutes of gameplay at a friend's house one time when I was about twelve.

They followed this up with the original Marathon.

Doom is largely iterative. It follows on from a tradition of older FPS games made by its developer, like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D. Like those predecessors, it relegates the little apparent story to pre-game and post-game text, and features a very video game-y structure that relies on discrete levels and fast, reflex-oriented play. It adds complexity and sophistication to these elements as seen in previous games, introducing more enemies, more weapons, and more complex and varied environments, then layers all of this on top of an already proven, solid gameplay core.

Marathon, by contrast, simplified and distilled the elements of previous games by its developer. It opts to be more clearly an FPS (as we understand it in modern terms) than any of its predecessors, shedding Pathways' adventure elements and non-linearity while increasing the player's arsenal. However, it's still less straightforward than Doom's pure level-by-level structure. Marathon presents itself as a series of objectives given to the player character (the Security Officer) by various other characters to be achieved within the level. These can range from scouting out particular areas, to ferrying items around the level, to clearing out enemies, to rescuing friendly characters, and so on.

Marathon's story, unlike Doom's, is front and center. Where Doom leaves the player to satisfy themselves that they are slowly progressing toward some ultimate enemy with every stage, Marathon gives the player concrete goals each step of the way, framing each objective as either a way to gain advantage over the enemy, or to recover from setbacks inflicted by them. Doom's story is focused on the player character and their direct actions. For narrative purposes, anything happening beyond your ability to observe is irrelevant. Marathon instead opts to give the player a feeling that although they are the one making crucial things happen in the story, they are not directing the action themselves.

Which brings me to something interesting about Marathon's story.

The player character, the Security Officer, has surprisingly little agency within the narrative. At a guess, I'd say that's because it would be almost impossible to express his own thoughts and emotions with the way the plot is relayed. It's true that most games -- especially in the FPS genre -- tell you what to do. Rescue the princess. Save the world. Prevent nuclear catastrophe. Etc. Etc. But this is normally done in an abstract sense, by presenting you a clear goal and some means to achieve it. Even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have an overarching goal that you're meant to be slowly working your way toward.

But while your actions in a given game are generally understood to be working toward the stated goal, the player is usually presented in the narrative as having a choice – or perhaps more accurately as having chosen prior to the beginning of the game proper – regarding whatever path the game puts them on. Mario has chosen to go save Princess Toadstool. Link has chosen to go find the pieces of the Triforce and save Princess Zelda. Sonic has chosen to confront Doctor Robotnik. Even the Doom Guy has chosen to fight the demons infesting the moons of Mars on his own rather than saying "fuck it" and running. The reasons for these choices may in some cases be left up to the player to sort out or to apply their imagination, but the point remains. These characters have chosen their destinies.

The Security Officer from the Marathon trilogy, by contrast, does not. Throughout the games, he is presented as following orders. "Install these three circuits in such-and-such locations". "Scout out this area". "Clear the hostile aliens out of this section of the ship". And so on, and so forth. Even in the backstory, found in the manual, the character is just doing his job, responding to a distress call before he fully realizes the sheer scale of the problem. The player, as the Security Officer, is always moving from one objective to the next on the orders of different AI constructs who happen to be in control of him – more or less – at a given time. The Security Officer is clearly a participant in events, but he lacks true agency.

In fairness, it must have been hard to figure out how to tell a compelling story within the context of a first-person shooter back in the early 90s, which is why so few people did it.

I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to explain it well (understatement; I'm not any kind of programmer), but the basic gist of it is that games like Doom weren't technically in 3D. The environments were rendered in such a way that they appeared in three dimensions from the player's perspective, but as earlier versions of source ports like ZDoom made clear, this was an illusion, one that was shattered the moment you enabled mouse aiming and observed the environments from any angle other than dead-ahead. The enemies, meanwhile, were 2D sprites, which was common in video games of any type for the day.

This was how Marathon was set up as well. It's how basically every first-person shooter worked until the release of Quake – and some after it.

The problem is that this doesn't lend itself very well to more cinematic storytelling. Sprites tended not to be very expressive given the lower resolutions of the day. At least, not sprites drawn to relatively realistic proportions like the ones in Doom and Marathon. So you couldn't really do cinematic storytelling sequences with them, and that left only a handful of other options for getting your story across.

You could do what I tend to think of as Dynamic Stills, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES. At its best, it enables comic book-style storytelling, but that's about as far as it goes.

You can do FMV cutscenes, which at the time basically involved bad actors in cheap costumes filmed against green screens or really low-budget sets. CG was relatively uncommon (and likely prohibitivesly expensive) even in the mid-90s.

You can do mostly text, interspersed throughout your game.

You can just not have much story at all.

Doom opted for option four. John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in video games is like story in porn. Everybody expects it to be there, but nobody really cares about it.

I disagree with this sentiment pretty vehemently, as it happens. There are some games that aren't well served by a large amount of plot, and Doom is definitely one of them. But to state that this is or should be true for the medium as a whole is frankly ridiculous.

There's something refreshing, almost freeing, about a game that has less a story than a premise. Doom starts off on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has been invaded by demons from hell. They've gained access by virtue of human scientists' experimentation with teleportation technology gone horribly, horribly wrong. The second episode sees you teleported to Deimos, which as been entirely swallowed up by Hell, and which segues from the purely technological/military environments of Doom to more supernatural environs. Episode 3 has you assaulting Hell proper. Doom II's subtitle, Hell on Earth, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the setting and premise of the game.

That's it. There are no characters to develop or worry about. It's just you as the lone surviving marine, your improbably large arsenal, and all the demons Hell can throw at you. Go nuts.

Bungie, meanwhile, took a different approach. I can't seem to find out which of their founders said it, but they have been on record as basically being diametrically opposed to Id Software in their attitude about story. "The purpose of games is to tell stories." I wish I knew who at Bungie said that.

Marathon is very much a story-oriented game. Of the aforementioned methods of storytelling, they opted for option three: text, and lots of it.

Marathon's story is complex and labyrinthine, especially as it continues through the sequels (Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity), and is open to interpretation at various points. Much is left for the player to piece together themselves. Aside from the player character, the story mainly centers on the actions of three AI constructs: Leela (briefly), Durandal, and Tycho. Their actions, in the face of an invasion by a race of alien slavers called the Pfohr, drive the story.

Their words and actions are relayed to the player by way of text at terminals scattered throughout the game's environments. Some of these take the form of orders and objectives given by the AI to the player character, the Security Officer. Some of these are more musings or rants (two out of the three AIs you work for over the course of the Marathon trilogy are not exactly all there), which serve to flesh out events happening beyond the player's observations, and help build the world. Some of these are seemingly random bits of background information, presented as if they were being accessed by someone else (often an enemy) before they were distracted by something – usually you, shooting everything in sight.

Design-wise, there are some interesting differences.

Doom is old-school from a time when that was the only school, with levels that strike a nice balance between video game-y and still giving at least a vague sense that they were built to be something other than deathtrap mazes. But what makes them old-school, at this point, is the fact that they're levels, with discrete starting and ending points, where your goal is to move from the former to the latter and hit the button or throw the lever to end it and begin the next one.

There's no plot to lose the thread of, no series of objectives for you to lose track of if you put the game down for a week, or a month, or longer still. It's extremely pick-up-and-play, equally well suited to killing twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, as you like.

The appeal (aesthetics aside) of Doom is also at least in part its accessibility. It has a decently high skill ceiling (which is to say, the level of skill required to play at an expert level), but a surprisingly low skill floor (the level of skill required to play with basic proficiency), which has lent it a certain evergreen quality. And Id Software has been keen to capitalize on this. Doom is one of a small number of PC games (Diablo II is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head; what is it with games that have you fighting demons from Hell?) that have been commercially viable and available basically from the day they were released. In addition to DOS on PCs, Doom was rejiggered for Windows 95, and also (eventually) saw release for Mac. Also, it's been sold for multiple consoles: the Super NES, the Sega 32X (regrettably), the Atari Jaguar (also regrettably), the PlayStation, the N64, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox One (the 360 version again, via backward compatibility). And source ports have kept the PC version alive and kicking, adding now-standard features like mouse aiming, particle effects, and support for widescreen displays.

The result is a game that, if you don't mind pixelated graphics, is as ferociously playable today as it was twenty-four years ago (as of this writing), and has enjoyed a kind of longevity usually not seen outside the realm of first-party Nintendo classics.

Marathon by contrast is somewhat less inviting.

From a technical standpoint, Marathon is more or less the equal of Doom. The environments throughout the series are rendered at a somewhat higher resolution, but the enemies are less well animated. Marathon also introduced the idea of mouse aiming to the FPS genre, and allowed the player to use that to look (and aim) vertically, which hadn't been done before either. Even Doom, though it also introduced more vertical gameplay, locked the player's movement to the strictly horizontal; vertical aiming was accounted for automatically, although source ports have modernized this. Marathon leans into its verticality a little more as a result, and level layouts are more complex, bordering on the impossiblely convoluted without the aid of your automap.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marathon would classify as a survival horror game, there are some elements of that genre in it. This is almost certainly unintentional, and I'm identifying them as such retroactively (the genre hadn’t really arrived yet). Still, they exist. Ammunition is more scarce than in Doom, forcing the player to lean on the lower end of their arsenal far later into the game than Doom does. Some weapons also feature alternate fire modes, which was a genre first.

Health packs are nonexistent; instead, the player can recharge their health at terminals designed for this purpose, usually placed very sparingly. Saving is also handled at dedicated terminals – a decision better befitting a console game, and somewhat curious here. In addition to health, there is also an air gauge, which depletes gradually whenever the player is in vacuum or underwater, and which can be difficult to find refills for.

Marathon also marks the early appearance of weapon magazines in the first-person shooter genre. Doom held to the old design established by Wolfenstein and older games that the player fires their weapons straight from the ammo reserves. If you have a hundred shotgun rounds, then you can fire a hundred times, no reload necessary. The reloading mechanic as we would most readily recognize it seems to have been added for the genre with Half-Life, for reasons of greater realism and introducing tension to the game.

Marathon's version of this, as you might expect for a pioneering effort, is pretty rough. There is no way to manually reload your weapons when you want. Rather, the game will automatically cycle through the reload animation once you empty the magazine. It does helpfully display how many rounds remain in the magazine at all times so you know how many you have left before a reload, and can plan accordingly. But it still exerts the familiar reload pressure, just in a different way. Rather than asking yourself whether you have the spare seconds for a reload to top off your magazine, now you have to ask yourself whether it's wiser to just fire the last few rounds of the magazine to trigger the reload now, when it's safe, so that you have a full magazine ready to go for the next encounter. Marathon's tendency to leave you feeling a little more ammo-starved than Doom makes this decision an agonizing one at times.

Id's game is pretty sparing with the way it doles out rockets and energy cells for the most high-powered weapons, true. But the real workhorse weapons, the shotgun and the chaingun, have ammo lying around in plenty. Past a certain early point in any given episode of Doom or Doom II, as long as you diligently grab whatever ammo you come across and your aim is even halfway decent, you never have to worry about running out. Marathon, by contrast, sees you relying on your pistol for a good long while. Compared to other weapons you find, it has a good balance of accuracy and availability of ammunition.

The overall pacing and difficulty of both games is also somewhat different.

Both games are hard, but in different ways. Doom has enemies scattered throughout a level in ones and twos, but most of the major encounters feature combinations and larger numbers. But the plentiful ammo drops and health packs mean the danger of these encounters tends to be relatively isolated, and encourages fast maneuvering and some risk-taking. If you can make it through a given encounter, you usually have the opportunity to heal up and re-arm before the next one. Doom is centered around its action. It gives you the shotgun – which you’ll be using for most of the game, thanks to its power – as early as the first level if you’re on the lookout for secrets, and by the second level, you really can’t miss it.

Marathon, by contrast, paces itself (and the player) differently. Ammo gets doled out more sparingly, and health recharge stations are likewise placed few and far between (rarely more than one or two in a stage, at least so far as I’ve played, and small enough that they can be easily overlooked). Save points are likewise not always conveniently placed, and the fact that the game has save points means that you can’t savescum, and dying can result in a fair amount of lost progress. The result is that, unless you’re closer to the skill ceiling, you tend to play more carefully and conservatively. You learn to kite enemies, stringing them along to let you take on as few at a time as possible.

The tactics I developed to play games like Doom and later Quake didn’t always serve me very well when I first started playing Marathon. The main danger in Bungie’s game is the death of a thousand cuts. Where Doom attempts in most cases to destroy you in a single fell swoop, Marathon seeks to wear you down bit by bit until you have nothing left, and you’re jumping at shadows, knowing that the next blow to fall may be your last. It encourages more long-term thinking. Similar to a survival horror game, every clip spent and every hit taken has meaning, and can alter your approach to the scenario you find yoruself in.

In short, if Doom is paced like a series of sprints, Marathon is, well... a marathon.

Another interesting difference is how both games deal with their inherent violence.

As games which feature future military men mowing down whole legions of enemies by the time the credits roll, violence is a matter of course. It becomes casual. But both games confront it in different ways.

Doom was one of the games that helped stir up a moral panic in the U.S. in the early to mid-90s (alongside Mortal Kombat, most notably). While I don't agree with it, it was hardly surprising. Doom gloried in its violence. Every enemy went down covered in blood (some of them came at you that way), some of them straight-up liquefying if caught too near an explosion. This is to say nothing of all the hearts on altars or dead marines littering the landscape to provide the proper ambiance.

The idea was simple: You were surrounded by violent monsters, and the only way to overcome them was to become equally violent. The game's fast pace and adrenaline-rushing gameplay only served to emphasize this. Doom isn't a stupid game by any means – it requires a certain amount of cleverness and a good sense of direction in addition to good reflexes and decent aim to safely navigate its levels -- but the primary direction it makes you think in is how? How do I get through this barrier, how do I best navigate through these dark halls, how do I approach this room full of enemies that haven't seen me yet?

Marathon asks those questions as well, because any decent game is constantly asking you those questions, because they are all variations on the same basic question any game of any kind (video games, board games, whatever) is asking you: How do you overcome the challenges the game throws at you using the tools and abilities the game gives you?

The difference (well, the narrative difference, distinct from all the rest) is that Marathon also talks about the violence seemingly inherent in human nature as one of a variety of things in its narrative.

To be fair, Marathon brings it up pretty briefly in its terminal text. But one of the terminals highlights Durandal's musings on the Security Officer, and humankind in general.

Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

Indeed, it may be seen as not just useful, but a necessary and essential component of humanity. Certainly it's vital to the Security Officer's survival and ultimate victory in the story of the games.

And yet, on the whole, Marathon is a less violent game. Or at least, it glories in its violence less. Enemies still go down in a welter of their own blood, because that happens when you shoot a living creature full of bullet holes. But it's less gory on the whole – bloody like a military movie, bloody as a matter of fact, in contrast to Doom's cartoonishly overwrought slasher-flick excess.

And yet it's Marathon that feels compelled to grapple with its violence, to ask what motivates it, not just in the moment, but wherever it appears in the nature and history of humankind.

On the whole, I think I come down on the side of Marathon, personally. Its themes, its aesthetic, and its characters are more to my liking. True, part of this is simply because Marathon has characters. Doom has the player character and a horde of enemies. Even the final boss of each installment has no narrative impact to speak of. They simply appear in order to be shot down. They're presented as the forces behind the demonic invasion, but aside from being bigger and stronger than all the other demons you face, there's no real sense of presence, narratively. And that's fine. But on the balance, I tend to prefer story in my games, and Marathon delivers, even as it's sometimes a bit janky, even as I get the feeling that Bungie's reach exceeded their grasp with it.

I can recognize Doom as the game that's more accessible, and probably put together a little better, and of course infinitely more recognizable. Id still sells it, and generally speaking, it's worth the five whole dollars (ten if you want Doom II as well) it'll cost you on PSN, or Xbox Live, or Steam.

Bungie, meanwhile, gave the Marathon trilogy away for free in the early 2000s. It's how I finally managed to play it, despite never owning a Mac. There are source ports that allow it to be played on PCs (or Linux, even). About the only new development in the franchise was an HD remaster of Marathon 2: Durandal for the Xbox 360. In the same vein as the remasters for Halo or Halo 2, this version changes nothing about the original except to update the graphics and adapt the control scheme for a 360 controller.

I'd love to see a remake of Marathon with modern technology, even though I know it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Bungie's occupied with Destiny for the foreseeable future. The most we've gotten in ages is a few Easter eggs. 343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo featured Durandal's symbol prominently on his mechanical eye, which fueled speculation for a little while that perhaps Halo took place in the same continuity. There's another Easter egg in Destiny 2 that suggests two of its weapons, the MIDA Multi-tool and the MIDA Mini-tool, fell out of an alternate universe where Marathon's events occurred instead of Destiny's. But that's been it.

The tragedy of Marathon is that it wasn't in a position for its innovations to be felt industry-wide.

Doom had the better overall playability and greater accessibility. If you were to ask where a lot of FPS genre innovations came from, the average gamer would probably not point to Marathon as the progenitor of those things. Quake would probably get credit for adding mouse aiming (even though it wasn't a standard menu option, and had to be enabled with a console command), or else maybe Duke Nukem 3D. Unreal would most likely get credited as the genesis of alternate firing modes, while Half-Life is probably the one most people remember for introducing the notion of reloading weapons. I'm not totally sure which other FPS would get the nod for mainstreaming the greater presence of story in the genre – probably Half-Life again.

But since it's free, I would strongly recommend giving the Marathon trilogy a spin. It's a little rough around the edges even judged by the standards of its time, but still eminently playable, with a strong story told well. And if it seems at times like the FPS That History Forgot, well, that's because History was mostly looking the other way at the time. It's part of the appeal for me, too. It feels at times like a "lost" game.

Let that add to its mystique.

#doom #marathon #retro games #retro gaming #first person shooter #fps #id softward #bungie

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