Marathon's 90s Revival: A Retro-Futuristic Masterpiece That Evokes Nostalgia and Optimism
With its fluorescent characters and ASCII text, Marathon stands as a masterclass in 90s nostalgia, brilliantly revived by Bungie into a retro-futuristic fever dream. This reboot is initially incomprehensible but quickly becomes thrillingly evocative, capturing the essence of an era when video games and club culture collided. Adding to the excitement, Donald Glover makes his debut in the Yoshi role, further enhancing the game's cultural relevance.
A Blast from the Past: The Original Marathon Era
Back in the mid-1990s, as a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our go-to multiplayer shooter. Since we all worked on Apple Macs instead of PCs, Bungie's sci-fi opus was one of the few networked shooters we could enjoy together. At the end of each day, staff from various magazines would load it up and play for hours, often with Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo. This period marked when video games discovered club culture, with Sony employing the legendary Sheffield studio, the Designers Republic, for box art and licensing the latest dance tunes for marketing and soundtracks.
Western developers were enamored with cyberpunk anime, newly accessible through distributors like Viz Media and Manga Entertainment, while the internet emerged as a weird and wild global meeting place. For a time, it felt as if we were living in a William Gibson novel, a sentiment that resonates deeply with the new version of Marathon.
The New Marathon: A Sci-Fi Extraction Shooter with 90s Flair
Released this week by Bungie, the new Marathon is heavily inspired by 1990s futurism, transforming into an online sci-fi extraction shooter. Players beam down to the planet Tau Ceti IV to scavenge for loot, complete missions, and potentially engage in combat with others. Its closest competitor is Arc Raiders, which similarly utilizes stylized retro-futurism. In a recent Twitter exchange, Bungie's global franchise director, Philip Asher, cited inspirations such as Sony's Wipeout game, its Mental Wealth ads for PlayStation, and translucent Dual Shock controllers.
And he is not exaggerating. Upon loading the game, players are immediately assaulted by discordant digital synth noises, Day-Glo-style colors, and warped pixelated images. Character models, with spiked helmets and fluorescent gloves, resemble 90s ravers, while the load-out screen is a fever dream of retro fonts and weird icons. Distorted videos of moths crawling over robotic faces add to the initial incomprehensibility, but this quickly gives way to a thrilling experience.
Commitment to Aesthetic: Nostalgia and Admiration
As players settle into the kinetic hyper-rush of glitching images, a sense of overriding nostalgia and admiration takes over. The game perfectly evokes that specific era when Johnny Mnemonic and Ghost in the Shell blasted cyberpunk visual language into mainstream consciousness, when everyone was reading Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson, and when every video game ad echoed Blade Runner's aesthetic.
Bungie's strong commitment to this aesthetic is admirable. Menus are crammed with ASCII text and animating images reminiscent of old HTML websites, and this theme extends to visual signs and systems within the game's environments. The fiction of the universe is filled with psychotic mega crops and anarchist hackers, while a stately serif font, similar to Century Old Style used in many 90s Japanese games, adds to the charm. On Tau Ceti IV, every UESC building features boxy computer displays scrolling green text read-outs, and architecture looks like giant MiniDisc players.
Bravery in a Homogenized Industry
Over the past five years, games and wider pop culture have become homogenized, with hints of cartoonish charm or dystopian sci-fi bleakness, but nothing too disorienting for mass audiences. Marathon unapologetically injects its influences straight into players' eyeballs, representing a brave gambit. This is especially notable given the recent shutdowns of online shooters like Concord, XDefiant, and Highguard, which were likely iterated over months and user-tested extensively.
Entering the most competitive game genres with such an uncompromising vision is wildly optimistic. Perhaps this is the most nostalgic element of the Marathon enterprise. The 1990s felt like the future was cracking open, with electronic dance music exploding, PlayStation advertised as an alien artefact of technological power, and the internet being fun and collectively owned. Returning to Marathon 30 years later, in a less certain games industry, feels weirdly poignant. The new story revolves around technological relics left by a once advanced and optimistic civilization, making it feel unnervingly relevant, timely, and even sad.
