Sunday, August 1, 1993

Bungie planned on shipping Pathways into Darkness, their new game, at MacWorld in Boston, starting on August 1, 1993. While I've been unable to locate confirmation that it actually shipped by that date, posts in Usenet indicate that it did ship sometime between August 1st and August 13.

On August 30, Jason Jones posts in comp.sys.mac.games that while Bungie isn't working on a sequel to Pathways, that future Bungie games would use texture mapping and AppleTalk networking.

The Pathways engine was originally intended to power a sequel to Minotaur using 3D graphics. However, it was discovered that the Minotaur gameplay did not lend itself to this presentation, and so Jason Jones and Alexander Seropian decided to create an entirely new game.

The engine used real-time 3D texture mapping-- at least on the walls.

According to the Marathon Scrapbook, the critical acclaim and success of Pathways allowed Bungie to get an office and start working in earnest.

Following Pathways, Jones began working on two projects: one codenamed Mosaic, the other codenamed Marathon. Marathon was originally intended as a sequel to Pathways. In a a late 1993 interview with IMG, Jones spoke of Marathon as "more of an arcade game" than either Pathways or Mosaic.

Later, Marathon became its own game and the Mosaic project was quietly dropped, never to be spoken of again.