Not all the Bungie game news is from E3 this week.

Part One of Simon Dupuis' Portal of Sigma scenario for Marathon has been released. Information about the release, which includes the first chapter and 11 net levels, can be found at Scenario News over at marathon.bungie.org. The files themselves can be downloaded from the Lh'owon Ar'kives.

Blayne writes on the Marathon Scenario News page that a new (admittedly small) desktop picture from the Where Monsters Are In Dreams scenario is up. The project, a prequel to the popular Rubicon scenrio, is still looking for people to help clean it up for release.

For those fans of Halo and Halo 2, or even of the Myth series of RTS games, that aren't familiar with Bungie's version of ancient history, also known as the 1990s, Inside Mac Games has put up a Marathon Primer, and the denizens of the Marathon Story Page are already picking it to pieces looking for small errors and omissions.

C|Net has up a list of ten PC games you can download for free; the Marathon Trilogy got included in its Aleph One incarnation. Somehow, Derek Smart's Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. also got included. (BC3K is free, but I think Smart sues you and your mom if you play it--Ed.)

Stosh at Bungie.net pointed out an article by Pat Miller in the latest issue of The Escapist. (If you're not familiar with the format, like I wasn't, the magazine issue itself is the downloadable PDF file linked at the bottom of the page--Ed.) The article is about Bungie's pre-Halo heritage, the Marathon Trilogy, and even includes a sidebar on the Haunted Apiary (ilovebees) alternate reality game.

The Battle Cat at Forerunners.org (and Cortana.org) wrote last week that there's a group that assembles each Saturday night at the hl.forerunners.org Hotline servers to assemble for networked games of Bungie's Marathon series, using the latest builds of Aleph One. If you've only ever played the Halo games or perhaps the Myth series, you owe it to yourself to see what Bungie fans were playing while everyone else was shooting exploding barrels in Doom. It's well worth it.

Stosh over at Bungie.net passes on word that one of the latest nightly builds of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Bungie's Marathon trilogy, has gained several new features more common among modern networked shooters: in this case, chat and server browser features.

In other Marathon-related news:

Today marks the start of a new series by a new staffer here at Rampancy. Sistimatic, a fan of Bungie games since the days of Marathon on the Macintosh, has looked back into the Marathon manual's retrospective on the battle at the Plain of Marathon to find war lessons applicable to Halo players today. Marathon Lessons is the first article in a series we're calling A Sistimatic Approach.

Other news:

[image:9067 align=left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Frankie posted today in the HBO forum that the webcam image we spotted last month was, indeed, the Pippin version of Super Marathon.

[image:9067 align=left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]One of the Bungie Webcams today is showing a pair of the old blue and red 3D glasses on top of what looks like a box for Super Marathon, a port of Bungie's Mac shooter to the ill-fated Bandai console, the Pippin@Home. The Marathon Story page has archived an old ad for the game from Cyberian Outpost.

The Marathon Map Makers Guild has released version 3.0b7 (remember the b stands for beta) of Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, or EMR for short. This is a third party scenario for Bungie's Marathon games, and has been updated to work with the latest enhanced open-source version of the Marathon engine, Aleph One.

...the lazy do news roundups. Here's what didn't quite manage to slip past us in the past few days, hours, or even weeks: