With its fluorescent characters and ASCII text, Marathon is a masterclass in 90s nostalgia

The revival of this 90s favourite is a retro-futuristic fever dream that is first incomprehensible, then thrillingly evocative. B ack in the mid-1990s, when I was a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our multiplayer shooter of choice. We all worked on Apple Macs, not PCs, so Bungie's sci-fi opus was one of the only networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of every day, staff from magazines around the company loaded it up and played for hours (usually with Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo). This was the era in which video games discovered club culture - Sony employed the legendary Sheffield studio the Designers Republic to create its box art and licensed the latest dance tunes for its marketing and game soundtracks.