Jonathan Nash

I found Doom's deathmatch clunky and ill thought-out. (The same levels as in the game itself? Dear oh dear.)

Quake's deathmatch annoyed me with its hammer-fire-and- you-will-win approach. And brownness.

No one wanted to play Duke Nukem with me because it was unfashionable.

And the net games in all the Amiga Doom clones were rubbish.

Marathon is elegant.

The cleverest innovation is that of magazines. While every other Doom game has big numbers telling you you have 160 bullets left (or whatever), Marathon's guns have clips that need to be (automatically) reloaded, leaving you undefended for a terrifying second or two. (They're also shown as pictures, which probably says something deeply revealing about Macs and PCs, but that's another story.)

Say you have the all-powerful rocket launcher. In Quake, you hammer fire until you've shot off all 160 charges. Firefights are decided on endurance. In Marathon, the rocket launcher has four magazines of two missiles, with a correctly long reload time. The elements of skilful dodging to secure a free shot at a reloading opponent and cunning withholding of one rocket to fox such attacks are thus excitingly introduced.

(Duke players can see this tremendously aaarghh-y effect by sticking to the pistol. Bizarrely, it, alone among the game's guns, also needs clips.)

Astonishingly, Marathon is the only Doom game to trouble to show you in network mode how your opponents are armed so you can adjust your tactics accordingly. Were the rest programmed by idiots or something? Truly the breath-catching moment of rounding a corner waving a pistol to bump into someone hefting a shoulder-mounted cannon is enormously special. Instead of standing toe-to-toe and hammering the fire button you can see the other fellow has a rocket launcher and as he backpedals desperately to avoid being caught in his own blast that your only chance is to hamper his egress by rushing up pressingly and coolly punching his face off.

AP folk employed differing tactics AS YOU WILL SEE. Gentleman editor Jonathan Davies, for example, was a master at lobbing bombs accurately over great distances, while Sue, Queen Of Art Eds preferred careening frighteningly into you and emptying an entire clip at point-blank range. Exploiting the super-fine control over your player Marathon gives you (there are about 20 keys if you're not a mouse player) I favoured the dancing-through- rockets and insulting-jink attacks, although Cam's unimpressed spraying of the entire area with bullets tended to prove the value of calculating percentages. The dishonourable tactic of running around after someone but not killing them until it was funny was, of course, unknown to AP. Until Tim The Wee Work Experience Lackey arrived, natch.

Bonusingly, the single-player game is equally thrilling. The ingenious story-telling device of terminals provides a cohesive, well-plotted tale to spur you on as variably sane characters bounce you around for their own reasons, and the difficulty levels' affecting not only monster hardness but their placement in a level ensures a decent degree of replayableness.

There were two sequels to Marathon. M2 had a noticeably superior single-player game, with underwater bits, lava floods, a gloriously twistier plot and civilians (all called Bob) who fought alongside you, but the net maps were unfulfilling for less than four players and the handling of a popular type of network connection was unforgivably buggy. M3 fixed things and had splendid net maps for any size of group, but needed a powerful machine and the one-player game was reputation- destroyingly bad. All Marathons suffered from weedy sapling sound, but among the thousands of fan add-ons someone had the sense to compile some apocalyptically harsh replacement noises so that's all right then.

It is the original Marathon that AP fought with most, as can be seen from the Films Compilation. One thing of note is that these (regrettably few) surviving records were all made around the time we first started playing the game. Elementary errors are committed where now we would spin out of your sights, lead you with tracer fire and splash a rocket off the floor to maximise the blast. In particular you should ignore the bit where I run up to a wall, pause, then, at the sound of distant gunfire, grenade myself to death. It was a trick or a cunning bluff, I forget which.