When I was in my early teens, I played a lot of Marathon — the classic Macintosh first-person shooter by Bungie.
There’s a detail about Marathon ∞ that I haven’t seen documented anywhere, but I thought was very cool.
If you tried to use MacsBug on a PowerPC machine to inspect (disassemble) M∞, none of the functions had names, except for one: HeyPervertStopLookingAtMyPEF.
(PEF stands for Preferred Executable Format, the way Mac OS applications stored PowerPC code).
Today, you can still play Marathon 2: Durandal on XBox Live for a price, or play any of the trilogy for free on a computer. Sadly though, I don’t think the game has aged as well as Escape Velocity, which is still a blast today.
Marathon Infinity still creeps me out, to be honest. I remember playing that when I was younger and up way too late, I think it got in my head. My girlfriend plays sometimes I get really worked up. Oh Durandal, what have you done to me?
I really hope Bungie re-visits the Marathon franchise (some say Halo is a prequel/sequel to Marathon, but there was frankly not enough AI heroics in it for my taste..)
Comment by vade — July 14, 2009 @ 1:16 pm