CHICAGO, IL—September 22, 1994—Bungie Software, makers of the award-winning Macintosh game Pathways Into Darkness will soon ship Marathon, a product which will raise the level of future computer game design. Marathon introduces a slew of unprecedented features which are destined to become standards for graphic computer-based entertainment.

Marathon reaffirms Bungie's commitment to supporting new Apple technologies. It is accelerated to take full advantage of the RISC architecture of the Power Macintosh, the hardware acceleration of the new Quadra 630 and the MIDI support of QuickTime 2.0. It is also the first Macintosh game to apply newly emerging virtual reality technologies, and can be played with the CyberMaxx VR headset. Up to 8 people can play a network game over LocalTalk, Ethernet or a modem with AppleTalk Remote Access.

Marathon makes a unique visual impact with 16-bit (thousands) color, a view with 5 degrees of freedom, dynamic lighting effects and full-screen texture-mapping. The graphics technology is resolution-independent, and could be adapted to other resolution standards. It reaches a frame-rate of 30 fps on the Power Macintosh, after which an internal limiter cuts in to prevent disorientation. Among its audio features are innovations such as realtime microphone broadcasting between network players, an original digital soundtrack using QuickTime 2.0, and active-panning stereo sound.

The Marathon engine is sophisticated enough to create non-orthogonal spaces, giving the architecture a singularly organic quality. Game play moves over multiple elevations; each "level" is in fact several stories of realistic 3-D space. The game's physics model takes into account gravity and momentum, the shock waves of nearby explosions and the trajectories of flying bodies.

All this, and it doesn't require CD-ROM. The minimum requirements are an 8-Bit (256 color) Macintosh with system 6.0.5 or better (networking requires system 7), 3 megabytes of RAM and a hard drive. Marathon will ship as a "fat-binary," providing optimal performance on both 68k-based and Power Macintoshes. Other features include a functionally-designed interface and a special "performance mode" to make the game run faster on slower computers. Marathon has a retail price of $69.99 and will be available soon at most local retail stores and mail order catalogs.