In case anyone had been wondering, the recent buyout of Bungie by Microsoft leaves MS owning the rights to the Marathon franchise, while Take Two gets the rights to Oni and Myth.

How does this affect the opening of the Marathon source code? Hopefully, not at all.

Derek Moeller, who maintains the FAQ for the Aleph One project had this to say:

And life goes on.

A new build of Aleph One at Marathon Open Source today, bringing the open source version of Marathon to v0.10.9 and fixing some bugs from v0.10.8. Perhaps more importantly, the Aleph One project now has a Hotline server to support it:

Aleph One, the open sourced version of Marathon, has reached another milestone with v0.10.8's release. Courtesy of codewarrior Loren Petrich, and the fine folk at Marathon Open Source, this new release boasts an interesting new feature:

Support for semitransparent liquid surfaces in OpenGL rendering. One can switch this on in the OpenGL-options dialog box.

Stop by and take a look at the screenshot--it looks pretty danged cool. Almost as good as the Tribes2 media we saw at E3... ;)

A busy day for Marathon news. Just recieved this PR from Pfhor, announcing another alternative future course for Marathon's evolution:

Shortly following Rhys Hill's release of Aleph One v0.10.6 comes a v0.10.7 courtesy of Loren Petrich. Packed to the gills with new features, this version unfortunately doesn't combine the new features and fixes in v0.10.6... perhaps a .8 is not far off. An excerpt from the features list:

A new version of Aleph One up at Marathon Open Source, and a bit of a bug report to go with it. Improved monitor support and faster code are the fruits of codewarrior Rhys Hill's labors, so stop buy a and pick up the latest build if you're just dying for an excuse to play Marathon again.

Although the maps haven't yet been released, the winners of the Simplici7y Contest have been announced, according to the Marathon Story Page.

The grand prize winner, Richard Dierkes, wins a Marathon Trilogy box set and, oddly enough, a copy of Super Marathon for the (ill-fated) Pippen. Along with the Story Page, we wonder what he'll be able to do with that, exactly. Anybody have a Pippen prototype lying around?

There's an interesting tidbit in a Game Guru column by Nate Birkholz over at MacCentral today, a reaction to all this Doom 3 controversy, and about games that imitate other games. Marathon, however, is specificially listed as a game that while also a first-person shooter that came out after the downloadable Doom but before the shrinkwrapped Doom 2, was innovative and new:

Now don't get me wrong -- not every first person shooter was a copycat.