One of my favorite stories in the world of mobile gaming is how Bungie’s classic ’90s first-person shooter series Marathon ended up coming to iOS. Prior to them being bought by Microsoft in 2000 to create the original Halo: Combat Evolved as an exclusive launch title for their upcoming Xbox console, Bungie open sourced the code for their Marathon trilogy and ever since a vibrant community has been porting the games to various platforms and creating mods in similar fashion to what has happened with Doom. Back in 2011 a member of that community named Daniel Blezek worked to create a port of the original Marathon for the iPad as a fun side project, and once we got word of it we were pretty excited.
However, there were some legal questions on whether the game could be officially released through Apple’s App Store with all the various open source licensing, but to everyone’s surprise Bungie themselves found out about the project and worked with Daniel to make it a reality in an official capacity. Thus in July of 2011 the original Marathon launched for the iPad for free.
It was freaking awesome playing through that classic again, and it played surprisingly well on the touchscreen. With the success of the first game it made sense to bring the sequels over too, and so in December of 2011 Marathon 2: Durandal was released and in May of 2012 Marathon Infinity was released, making the entire trilogy available to iOS device owners. Also all three games ended ...