Marathon (actually a series of three games: Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal, and Marathon Infinity) was Bungie's award-winning first person shooter for the Macintosh. It has attained cult status among many players for its astoundingly intricate and stirring storyline, and Halo is expected to be have some connections to Marathon.

In the fall of 2001, some details of Halo's timeline were inadvertently released through an xml file on Microsoft's website; the details seemed to suggest that Halo is not, strictly speaking, a sequel or prequel to Marathon, but some connections are still possible.

Unlike Halo, Marathon was not a fully-3d game. It used a 2.5d engine and as such could not, in its original form, render true bridges or ramps. Creatures in Marathon were 2d sprites and not 3d models.

Marathon 2 did appear on the Windows platform.

Bungie eventually released the source code for Marathon Infinity. A community of developers took that code and developed the Aleph One project, which is advancing the engine towards a fully 3d environment using OpenGL, and porting it to Windows and Linux.

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