Eighty years after the conquest of the Pfhor, mankind descended into one of its blackest hours. The return to Earth by the Tau Ceti survivors aboard a stolen Pfhor vessel had brought with it a mass of new technology which was quickly put to use. The Transglobal Companies, leaders in developing these new technologies, went multi-planetary as mankind suddenly discovered an entirely new way to travel the stars. The first of these companies was the Marathon Planetary Communications Company, headed (publically at least) by the Tau Ceti survivors.
But the battle was on. Rival companies developed their own versions of the stolen technologies. The battle with the Pfhor had demanded new breeds of soldiers and new types of 'biological' weapons. This development was headed by GenCorp, one of the fastest growing companies to appear after M.P.C. And as M.P.C.'s technologies were copied the company itself faced decline. The new bio-companies were better suited to the exploration and colonisation of space, and M.P.C. faced a loss in its market share unless it could regain the lead. The battle for profits became dark and bloody.
And on a bleak world, halfway between the edge of the galaxy and nowhere, trouble was about to come crashing planetwards....
Welcome to Trojan: a completely new scenario for the Marathon 1 engine. The full game is still in development, but in the meantime, for your pleasure and enjoyment, we are releasing this demo. It contains 2 full solo levels, a prelude to the solo scenario, and 3 net maps. Look for the release of the full game hopefully before the end of the year.
To Install
Trojan is effectively a completely separate game that just happens to run under the Marathon engine. All this demo requires is the main Marathon application and a valid serial number (all other files are provided here).
The support files (Shapes, Sounds, Map, Physics Model) for Trojan should all be in a single folder. Double-click on the Trojan Installer program. Select your main Marathon application in the resulting dialog box. All resources will be installed into the Marathon application. (None of the original resources will be deleted – they will simply be moved, so that when you are through playing Trojan, you can rerun the installer application and remove all of Trojan's custom resources, leaving you with your original files.) Place the modified application into the folder containing the support files. You are now ready to play!
BEWARE: The shapes file contains only those shapes needed to play this demo. DO NOT TRY TO USE IT TO PLAY OTHER MARATHON MAPS – YOU WILL CRASH.
For those of you familiar with ResEdit you can add the contents of the Trojan Icons file to the Marathon application. This will replace the original Marathon icons with the funky new Trojan icons set (including saved games and films). To see them you may need to rebuild your desktop. (Note: you must have only the patched version of Marathon on your hard drive, unpatched versions may prevent the new icons from appearing).
Make sure the external Physics Model is in use (you should see a warning box when opening the game app). If you see flying Marines, for example, then this means that Marathon hasn't recognised the file name for the external Physics Model. And all sorts of strange things will happen.
About the Game
This demo is the work of a number of people:
Hamish Sanderson: The Boss - Plot, Shapes and Sounds (or most of them anyway).
Chris Ashton: The guy who gets things done - Maintains the Trojan web site, and creator of “Arrival.”
Jos Delbar: Pfhorte Scripting Wizard - Creator of “Command and Conquer” and other useful stuff.
Thanks should also go to those currently laboring in the background on the remaining levels: too many to mention right now but you'll see their names in the full game.
Thanks also to:
Steve Israelson, for creating Pfhorte 1.0d16,25,26
Dan Walkowski, for Mia 1.0b19
Michael Hanson, for MME 1.1
Joe Kloss, for MSE 1.2
Kevin Bell, for MSI 2.0b1
Jeremy Parsons, Dan Johnson, Evan Harper, for Pfhred 1.1.3
Kirill Levchenko, for the Trojan Installer
And Bungie (especially Jonas Eneroth), of course.
Special thanks to:
Claude Errera, without whose help you wouldn't even be seeing this demo.
The full Trojan package will contain over 15 different, all new, types of aliens and over 25 solo levels. Not to mention a cool new music track that'll seriously rock. Look out for it!
Comments, suggestions and problems should be addressed to:
H.A.SANDERSON@dundee.ac.uk
This demo is Put-a-post-on-alt.games.marathon-ware. If you play it and like it put a post on a.g.m telling everyone why they should be playing Trojan instead of MI. ;)
Please note that the Shapes file supplied with this demo is a limited version which lacks some of the sprites, etc. of the full game. So if you try to make your own maps and they crash, don't blame me. The usual disclaimers apply should your Mac suddenly crash/melt/explode. It ain't my problem.
Also note that this version of Trojan may not be compatible with previous versions.
Marathon artists might also check out the "Guide to Making M1/M∞ Artwork", currently available from MHNW. It contains a ton of info on creating your own custom sprites and graphics for all versions of Marathon.
