The atmosphere around Bungie's Heqdquarters during Marathon's development stage was much like a commune (without the loft goals, hash brownies and lack of running water). Everyone worked in a single open room, with the exception of Alex who won the rightto a private office in a best-of-seven thumb wrestling tournament. This clustered setup allowed for key exchanges like the following:

"Hey Greg."

"What?"

"Your mom."

"Hey Jason."

"What?"

"No, YOUR mom."

A minute doing anything other than working on Marathon was considered a wasted minute, so activities like sleep and lunch were carefully kept to a minimum. More often than not, the group ended up eating at La Cocina, a small Mexican restaurant with the distinction of being the only eatery in existance. The occasionally grabbed canned food from a nearby liquor store as a treat.

The sheer amount of work to be done was daunting. Jason, Ryan and Alain spent long hours compiling and debugging new versions of the game engine and tweaking code for maximum performance. Ryan hacked away at Vulcan, valiantly trying to tame the beast he had unleashed. Alain made networking happen through sheer force of will. Reg created ALL the art: weapons, aliens, civilians, the player himself - not tomention all the textures used to add detail to the Marathon Universe. Alex had the task of finding or making sounds for every possible audio event in the game - aliens grunting, doors buzzing open, grenades whooshing through echoing metal corridors - as well as composing a number of origonal songs for Marathon's soundtrack. Greg had to conquer Vulcan long enough to make ten-odd levels for the single player game. The First Law of Vulcan, "Save Early and Often," gives some idea of Vulcan's penchant for dropping into a debugger or simply locking up the entire machine. It once crashed so hard that Greg's computer actually shut down.

Marathon would grow over the ensuing months to encompass 27 solo levels and 10 net levels. The Seroopian-designed "You Don't Need To See My I.D." was a secret level; the title referred tot he scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan Kenobi uses a Jedi mind trick to breeze past a gaggle of stormtrooopers.

Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick created the bulk of the solo levels. Jason was responsible for the infamously tedious "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap" level, along with such levels as "Bob-B-Q", "Habe Quiddam", and "Ingue Ferroque". Jason also created the aformentioned net level "Mars Needs Women", the seoncd level ever built with vulcan and the primary net game test map.

Great had a fondness for creating maps with complicated overlapping areas. "G4 Sunbathing", the only vacuum level in the game, was one of these. "G4" attempted to convey the idea of what it would be like to explore the surface of a moon-sized colony ship. The name itself refers to what the player is doing while traversing the "courtyard" area of the station.