Marathon felt like such a huge deal at the time, with its funky triangular prism box, its hyperliterate storyline, and its novel network multiplayer modes. And yet it seems to get little to no airtime in video game nostalgia mythology.

Maybe it was just too niche as a Mac game.

That's exactly it, imho: not enough people got to experience how amazing the trilogy was due to platform exclusivity.

Just to be clear, it was a mac game. It still came out and Halo: Combat Involved ran beautifully on PPC and Intel (Rosetta 1 translation?).

Good memories of that game. I still haven’t played marathon :0

Years after the Xbox version. The Mac port came out in Dec. 2003. The Xbox version released in Nov. 2001. It was also published and ported by MacSoft whereas earlier Bungie games like Myth I and II and Marathon were Mac from the beginning.

I’m willing to bet if halo didn’t come to xbox we wouldn’t be discussing it today and still playing halo games 20 years later.

My first computer as a kid (the Family computer) was a Macintosh Quadra 610 complete with a US Robotics dial-up modem. I'm pretty sure we got it at Circuit City for like 4 or 5 grand, something totally obscene. I remember trying to visit the Lego website and could never get much more than a single image to load. Crazy to look back on the specs now and see that it had a clockspeed of 25 MHz.

I remember the first time I saw the Marathon Infinity box. I was so stoked to play! But, alas, it never booted completely. The boot splash would come up and then it would hang. My first dose of digital disappointment!

It was going to be an RTS. Pretty different if you ask me.

Nah, here's a preview of Halo for Mac, in 1999. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebI5lkLRTdg Before Microsoft bought Bungie. It looks almost identical to the Xbox version from 2001.

It definitely started as an RTS, but it had morphed into Combat Evolved before Microsoft bought bungie.