Freeverse discusses porting Marathon 2 to XBLA

5 Comments by Scott Jon Siegel Nov 22nd 2007 3:01PM
Filed under: Microsoft Xbox 360, First Person Shooters

Gamasutra's postmortems are excellent opportunities to look back at certain games, and hear with unabashed honesty what went right and wrong throughout the course of development. Such is the case with developer Freeverse's postmortem on their enhanced port of Bungie's classic Marathon 2: Durandal for Xbox Live Arcade.

Freeverse employee Mark Levin goes into insane levels of detail describing the arduous task of bringing Marathon 2 -- originally a Macintosh title -- over to the Xbox 360. He discusses the team's decision to re-work the graphics for HD, and the difficulty of bug-testing very old code, but somehow neglects to discuss the game's propensity for causing upset stomachs.

Regardless, it's a great and honest read, with some real insight into the treacherous task of bringing old games to new consoles.

Tags: bungie, freeverse, marathon, marathon-2, postmortem, xbla, xbox360

(Page 1) Reader Comments

AndrewNeo: Nov 22nd 2007; 3:35PM

A read link helps, instead of burying the URL with several others in the article.

TheMoonman: Nov 22nd 2007; 4:16PM

Marathon? I don't wanna sound like an a-hole, but...c'mon when am I gonna get Doom II?

Xanto: Nov 22nd 2007; 4:52PM

Better yet, when are we going to get the Final Doom?

dys: Nov 22nd 2007; 7:17PM

fix the first game!! Who can play that without getting motion sick?

DaiMac79: Nov 23rd 2007; 9:25AM

Yeah, this game was a bit of a disappointment for me. Its obvious Freeverse put alot of work into it, which I do appreciate, but in the final analysis I still enjoy the free version through AlephOne much more, which you can get for virtually any major computer platform at source.bungie.org.

My main problem with the XBLA port, other than the controls, was the horrible network performance. I never played a game that wasn't lagged beyond any hope of playability. Again, open source people have already got a cross platform version with good networking, so I'm a bit baffled that they couldn't get it done on XBLA.

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