I recently decided that it’s time to give up on my PSP. I definitely don’t play games on it and I rarely even use it for music in my car anymore. It’s time to replace it with something a little more practical and a lot more fun: my ‘Mystic’ Macintosh Color Classic. Oh, yes!

... And you think I’m kidding!

This weekend I fired up my Color Classic and decided it was time to set it for some nostalgic gaming: Marathon. After all, the entire Marathon Trilogy is now a free download! I’m currently upgrading to System 7.5.5, but once I’m done I’ll be happily yelling “frogblast the ventcore!” with dual-Enforcers in-hand!

There are other great games I will likely end up playing on my Color Classic, but Bungie’s are by far my favorite. They were quite original at the time, extremely fun (there’s nothing like Marathon LAN games), and Bungie was the game company I aspired to be when I was in the game development period of my life. I had played, although not completed, the Marathon games in middle school and high school, and feverishly stalked the development of Oni and Halo in high school and college.

Unfortunately, I do not plan on picking up an Xbox 360 (the PSP was not a good introduction to video games consoles for me), so I’ll likely never get to play through the Halo trilogy (yes, as of May 9 ^th, Bungie has announced Halo 3!). But their games, technologies, and stories will always interest me greatly.

For an extra little Marathon-related tidbit, read From ‘94 to Infinity: Before Halo in the latest issue of the escapist and Tuncer Deniz’s blog post: The Bungie Years – Part 1 (including some archival footage of the developers behind Marathon and the Chicago Bungie studio). An interesting coincidence that this should all show up the same week I decided to pick up Marathon again. :)