Marathon, with its fluorescent characters and ASCII text, is a great lesson in ’90s nostalgia | Retro games

forIn the mid-90s, when I was a writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our favorite multiplayer shooter. We were all on Apple Macs, not PCs, so Bungie’s sci-fi game was one of the only networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of each day, magazine staff across the company would load it up and play it for hours (usually with Chemical Brothers or Orbital Blast from the stereo). This was the era when video games discovered club culture – Sony hired legendary Sheffield studio ‘Designers Republic’ to create their box art and license the latest dance tunes for marketing and the game’s soundtrack. Western developers were fascinated by cyberpunk anime, newly available thanks to video distributors like Viz Media and Manga Entertainment, and the Internet began to emerge as a strange and wild global meeting place. For a while, it felt like we were living in a William Gibson novel.

I’m reminded of these things while playing the new version of Marathon, which Bungie released this week and which is heavily inspired by the future of the 1990s. It’s now an online sci-fi shooter where players head to the planet Tau Ceti IV to hunt for loot, carry out missions, and perhaps blow each other up in the process. Its closest competitor is Arc Raiders, which similarly uses a retro-futuristic style. In a recent Twitter exchange, Bungie’s global franchise director, Philip Asher, chose the name of Sony’s Wipeout game, PlayStation’s Mental Wealth ads and transparent Dual Shock controllers as inspiration.

Wow, he’s not kidding. Once you load up the new game, you’ll be assaulted by cacophonous digital synth sounds, Day-Glo-style colors, and pixelated distorted visuals. With their spiked helmets and fluorescent gloves, the character models look like ’90s singers; The loading screen is a fever dream of outdated fonts and weird icons; Downloading the game shows you distorted videos of butterflies crawling over robotic faces. For a few minutes, it is almost incomprehensible.

Then, as I settled into the hyperkinetic rush of false images, I felt great nostalgia and admiration. Nostalgia for the era that the game perfectly evokes – that very specific period in which Johnny Mnemonic and Ghost in the Shell exploded the visual language of cyberpunk into the mainstream consciousness; When everyone was reading Jeff Nunn and Neal Stephenson; When every video game ad looked like something out of Blade Runner.

I admire how strongly Bungie has committed to this aesthetic: how its menus are crammed with ASCII text and animation like an old HTML site; The way this theme extends to visual signs and systems in game environments; And how the fantasy universe is crowded with psychotic megacrops and anarchic pirates. I like to use a very special, very luxurious serif font – very similar to the Century Old Style in many 90s Japanese games. On the planet Tau Ceti IV, each UESC building is loaded with a boxy computer and displays scrollable green text readouts. Every piece of architecture looks like a giant MiniDisc player.

Over the past five years, we’ve become accustomed to homogenous aesthetics in gaming and broader popular culture – A hint of cartoony magic here, a little dystopian sci-fi gloom there. Nothing that would confuse the collective user base. Marathon pumps its effects extraordinarily directly into your eyeballs. It’s a brave maneuver, because many online shooters — from Concord to XDefiant to Highguard — have recently shut down. They have undoubtedly been iterated over months and years, then user tested to death. So delving into the most competitive game genres with such an uncompromising vision is very optimistic for me.

This is perhaps the most nostalgic element of the Marathon project. The 90s felt like the future was opening up – electronic dance music was exploding, the PlayStation was heralded as a weird artifact of great technological power, the internet was fun and we all had it. It’s strangely poignant to return to a gaming marathon now, 30 years later, after everything I’ve seen, and in a games industry that seems far less sure of itself. In the new version, the story revolves around the technological ruins left behind by an advanced and optimistic civilization. I couldn’t help but think: Should this be so timely, so timely, so sad?