Marathon beta - “Feeling the Noise“ June ’94

In this third leaked beta, Marathon was beginning to take shape. The physics are floatier and more Marathon-like than the older betas which had sharper Pathways into Darkness-like movement, but strafing is still PiD-slow and forward movement feels like you’re on skates (too much momentum/inertia). The opening room is clearly a demo of “noise“ and cloaking effects. The only sounds playing in this beta are the Hunter activation sounds. A cloaked alien which might be the Hunter’s hound (cut from the final game) skitters about. The Hunter shoots missiles at you but they don’t do damage. Weapons cannot be fired in this build (as far as I know). The reason that the screen starts flashing in all sorts of ways at 1:22 is that I was pushing buttons on the keyboard to see what they did. Several keys trigger “fader effects“ which are similar to when you take damage and pick up items in the final game. One more thing that I failed to show here: you can click the buttons in the HUD with the mouse. The only button that does something interesting is the one with four squares, which activates a map view that looks exactly like the final Marathon automap. The fancy compass at top-left was too CPU-intensive for some Macs and was cut from the final game.