Classic shooter Marathon coming to iPad

Older Mac lovers will remember playing Marathon on their 68030 or 68040 powered computer many eons ago. The latest news is that the 1994 genre redefining shooter is coming to the iPad.

Bungie, the makers of the original game however won't be involved because the port is being handled by Daniel Blezek. He will be using the Marathon source code which was released more than a decade ago. While the complexities of moving Marathon to the iPad are numerous, Blezek says he has managed to configure a good control system, thanks to help from beta testers.

For the purposes of nostalgia the game will certainly be worth a look, but we can't help but feel that it will look really outdated in 2011. Regardless, some kudos has to be given to a guy who has spent over a year trying to port a classic title to the mobile space.

He said “Performance and iPad device constraints reared their ugly head early on. I made a mistake in not running the app on the device from the beginning, because it's much faster to develop in the simulator. Going from 30 FPS to 3 is disheartening to say the least. And, unlike modern games that use 3D models, Marathon is all sprite based, requiring all the sprites to be pre-loaded which ate up all available memory and crashed the app mid way through the first level. Not fun. I ended up being quite intimate with Instruments. After extensive tweaking, the games run at a consistent 30 FPS.”

Kitguru says: Worth a look? We think so.

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