An early release of Marathon (labeled Marathon Alpha in the version resource) was first shown at Macworld San Francisco in January 1994. It was included in the Marathon Trilogy box set. For screenshots and a walkthrough, see:

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/betasfjan94.html

This download contains information extracted from the Marathon alpha. It includes:

== Marathon Alpha Shapes.shpA

This Shapes file, in Aleph One format and viewable in ShapeFusion, was converted as faithfully as possible from the original Marathon Alpha resources. The collections are:

0 - "Dan Rules" (walls), resource 128
1 - "Door", resource 129
2 - "Floor", resource 130
3 - "Interface", resource 192
4 - "Items", resource 193
5 - "Alien", resource 194
6 - "Guns", resource 195
7 - "Mountains", resource 196
8 - "Scenery", resource 197

The alpha shapes were largely similar to the Pathways into Darkness format, but some changes were made. Notably, additional 'sgrp' resources were added with sequence information.

== Images (from Shapes file)

The "Images" directory contains all the bitmaps and frames in PNG format. It also contains animated GIFs of the sequences with more than one frame.

== Maps

The alpha's Maps file contained eight levels, although six were inaccessible, and crash the game immediately if played. Only about a third of the second level is playable: the map actually contains four unconnected sets of rooms.

== Developers

In the "Developers" folder, I included the Perl scripts used for the conversion. (The shapes-file conversion was done in two parts, with XML as an intermediate format for ease of debugging.) They're hardly commented, but might be interesting to future hackers.

Grendel Lives,
- Hopper (hopper@whpress.com)
July 13, 2012