May 19th, 2025

Season One Announcement:
Selection Three

click/tap to play music, double click/tap to pause!

I'm happy to announce the next game I've selected for Capralogue Season One: Marathon!

This was meant to go out on Friday, but I hesitated due to the news surrounding the franchise reboot's confirmed art theft & subsequent claims of company morale in 'free fall'. A big part of the idea around Season One for me was the idea of 'origin points', and you'll see many of the titles selected across the season carry this loose thematic cohesion. When it seems that the future of Marathon is uncertain at best & torched at worst, the idea of saying "Let's play the original Marathon to get excited for the reboot!" became a much tougher sell for me.

However, in taking the weekend to think more about it, I believe Marathon from 1994 is worth playing and learning from even completely removed from the promise of a brand new big budget Extraction Game reboot. In the years following DOOM's seismic impact on the First Person Shooter genre, we'll learn that Marathon found and established itself in a very exciting niche within the genre - pushing storytelling boundaries, emphasizing atmosphere, and cementing Macintosh in the mid 90s as a real player in the games space.

To put it lightly, the circumstances around the reboot of this franchise are a real disappointment. With that being said, that disappointment is only amplified by how important Marathon is as a franchise - not only for Bungie, not only for Apple's Macintosh, but for the trajectory of the Games Industry as a whole. It's a title & franchise that I have wanted to dig into for a very long time now, and I'm not going to let an uncertain and sullied future rewrite the past.

So look forward to Marathon, the third title in Capralogue Season One!