Play the Retro First-Person Shooter Classics Marathon & Marathon 2 for Free

The Marathon series of video games are classic first-person shooters set in a sci-fi world, and longtime Mac users may have fond memories of playing Marathon, Marathon 2, or Marathon Infinitiy as single-player or multiplayer over a LAN in the mid 1990s.

But you don’t need a time machine or to run Mac OS Classic 9 in a web browser to go back and enjoy these retro gaming classics, because you can play them on your modern Mac (or Windows or Linux PC) right now, natively!

Thanks to the Aleph One open source project, the Bungie Marathon classic series is available for free for MacOS, Windows, and Linux, with native support for Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity. The downloads are small too, for example Marathon 2 is just 60mb, and it plays flawlessly on modern Apple Silicon Mac hardware.

• Get the Marathon series free from the Aleph One project homepage here

Just download the game you want to play, mount the disk image, and away you go.

These are the full Marathon games, set in their fun science fiction worlds and complete with intriguing storylines that hold up well to this day. Sure the graphics are now very retro and pixelated, but that just adds to the charm and entertainment of going back to play these oldschool gaming classics.

Even if you haven’t played the Marathon series way back in the 1990’s, you still might get a kick out of playing an old-school shooter like these.

(And yes if you have macOS Sonoma or newer and a compatible Mac, you’ll find it runs in Game Mode, not that such a lightweight game needs the performance boost)

You can also get the official Marathon Classic release from Steam here if you’d prefer to go the Steam route, and that’s also available for Mac and PC (cheers to DaringFireball for pointing this out), but for me I find simply downloading the disk image files and launching the apps directly works perfect for my purposes.

Have fun!