The Story Behind The Mix:
I worked at a Macintosh computer retail store in the mid-90’s and the other employees and I played a first-person shooting game called Marathon. I had played a lot of videogames from Pong through Atari 2600, games on my Apple ][ (Karateka & Ultima II were favorites), and some NES. Marathon was one of the first games I was kind of snobby about though. While Doom was all the rage in the PC gaming world for being a mindless kill-fest, Marathon had a story, man. And was therefore superior. 😉 I’m told the story still lives somewhere in Bungie’s Halo for Xbox (Bungie created Marathon, you see).
What was new to me about Marathon was that it had a network mode where you could play against other players on the Local Area Network. This was my introduction to LAN parties. Our store was wired up with Ethernet and all of the computers were on the LAN. Since we had good demo machines set up, we could play with some of the best hardware available at the time. (PowerMac 8100/8500s were best for hosting the games)
It was a violent game, lots of killing & splattering, and part of the fun was killing – or being killed – in a spectacular way – a perfect grenade shot behind you that would launch your carcass back toward the arena, getting shot by someone with good aim from far away – there was no avoiding it, and it was all in good fun.
You could name your characters, too, but the only one I remember now was our store manager who called himself Avenger. It was a cool moniker, inspired by the car he drove at the time – a Dodge Avenger.
This mix was made special for the nights we’d hang out after hours, put the tape in, and kill each other for a few hours. On the J-card, you can probably see where I started emphasizing words that had to do with the game: kill, bleeding, shot, etc. And the songs are all pretty fast & hard musically, to lend an air of urgency and chaos to the games.
I present to you: Marathon | Rdio / Spotify |
(Some songs aren’t the originals, and there are a few that are missing, but we take what our digital music overlords give us.)
Your Older Brother's Music Blog 