"Imagine, if you will, a first-person shooter game. Imagine it set in a science fiction world where humanity is on the verge of extinction from mysterious alien forces; imagine that it is beautifully rendered in the level design and complemented by a compelling storyline, and imagine that it is loaded with exotic alien weaponry that you can unleash on your friends and enemies in adversarial and cooperative multiplayer games alike. Not too hard to picture, right? Now - and here's the tricky part - imagine this game as having been released eleven years ago.

Is that a bit more difficult to envision? It shouldn't be, because you, as the kind of classy, educated gamer - you know, the kind who reads magazines that are distributed exclusively in PDF format - that you are, should have already played Bungie's Marathon trilogy back during the formative years of the FPS. Right now, Bungie's Halo 2 is a phenomenon that has won critical acclaim, sold over $125 million in its first day of sales, and perhaps most significantly, drawn in the Average Joe to the wonderful world of online multiplayer gaming via XBox Live. Anyone who wishes to understand this success would do well to investigate its roots in Marathon on the Macintosh." [more]