After agonizing delays and fan outcries since August, the release date that Bungie promised at MacWorld Boston that year, Marathon finally ships just before Christmas of 1994, a fully texture-mapped first person shooter with an engrossing science fiction plot.

The game takes place on the sprawling colony ship Marathon, hollowed out from Deimos, a moon of Mars. Told through a series of text terminals, a Byzantine plot gradually unfolds telling a story of military cyborgs, rampant artificial intelligences, and alien slavers.

The game provides the kind of twitch gameplay that Mac gamers had lusted after since Doom was released on the PC, combined with a deep storyline and consistent artistic vision-- something the Doom game sorely lacked.