Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

Tempus Irae Redux is now available:

* Nardo’s website: nardo.bungie.org/tir/
* Steam Workshop: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=344…

It took nearly five years of development, thousands of hours of hard work by several skilled developers, hundreds of new textures, hours of music, thousands of lines of code, hundreds of remastered and remixed sounds, and at least one nervous breakdown, but we’ve finally completed our update and modernization of every level of the classic Marathon Infinity mods Tempus Irae and Tempus Irae 2: The Lost Levels, featuring 49 solo and 79 net levels. It includes two new levels featuring 3,000 polygons between them and thousands of polygons’ worth of additions to existing levels. We rebalanced the game’s combat to be more fun and exciting, remastered every graphic and sound used in the game, added dozens of new landscapes and textures employing parallax mapping and animation, and added a soundtrack featuring unique music for every non-repository solo level. Borzz made a trailer for it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpG0s...

The original Tempus Irae and The Lost Levels are still available: nardo.bungie.org/alephone.php

I was personally involved with this scenario’s development from May 2020 through January 2025; I remastered or remixed every sound in the game, was responsible for nearly 50% of the map changes (with James responsible for most of the rest), and wrote several original songs and thousands of lines of code.

A lot of plans were overturned at the eleventh hour; as a result, several things I showed in preview videos have been removed from the final game. Such is the nature of game development.

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 6

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

Just in case some of you missed it, Bungie’s classic 1994 FPS Marathon – the first entry in the series that put them on the map before Destiny, before Halo, before Myth – is now available on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/2398450/Classic_Maratho… If you haven’t played it yet, now’s a perfect opportunity.

Does this foreshadow more Marathon 1 gameplay on my channel? As a matter of fact, yes; ReaperAA recently set me a complete set of Vidmaster films of M1. I’ll begin posting them soon, alongside the rest of his Phoenix and Apotheosis X films. (I believe he’s a good chunk of the way through the Marathon 2 challenge by now as well.) I have another project that’ll keep me busy until the evening of the 15th (you’ll hear more about that afterwards), but once that’s over, expect a bunch of new videos.

1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 27

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

In case you missed it: Eternal 1.3 preview 6 has been released.

Website: eternal.bungie.org/
Development page: eternal.bungie.org/development
Simplici7y entry: simplici7y.com/items/eternal-x

This is the first new release in over a year. New features include:

* An in-game menu system to toggle several new options. Toggle these by holding Aux Trigger and firing; Aux Trigger + Prev/Next Weapon scrolls between them. Thanks to Solra Bizna for coding this. Options include:
* On around twenty levels, hide irrelevant layers of the overhead map (an immense assistance for navigation). Thanks to Jon Irons for coding this. (new in this release)
* An RPG-style monster health display. Thanks to aperturegrillz for coding most of this. (new in this release)
* Disable inter-player damage in cooperative games. (new in this release)
* Shared pickups in cooperative games. (new in this release)
* A counter tracking the secrets you’ve picked up this level and throughout the game, along with the total number of both that could have been collected.
* Auto-save the game on level transitions.
* New Drone and Juggernaut sprites in chapter 4. Thanks to General-RADIX for these.
* Fixes to dozens of physics inconsistencies. Thanks to Irons for expanding Charlemagne’s functionality to assist with this as well.
* Major music changes:
* Every level now has unique music. The soundtrack now runs for more than seven hours.
* The background music for “We Met Once in the Garden” shifts between three different arrangements based on in-game events, in a manner inspired by soundtracks like FTL: Faster Than Light and Cadence of Hyrule (which feature multiple, vastly different arrangements of the same melodies at the same tempi, enabling the games to switch from one to another at the drop of a hat).
* Seventeen of Craig Hardgrove’s tracks have been newly remastered or remixed from newly available, much higher-quality sources, some multiple times.
* The game soundtrack is now encoded as Opus, the objectively best lossy music codec by every performance metric.
* True obsessives may use an optional lossless FLAC version for the in-game soundtrack (link below).
* New (or newly accessible) areas in “Deja Vu All Over Again”, “Roots and Radicals”, “Core Done Blew”, “A Friend in Need”, “Frog Blast the Vent Core”, and “I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This”.

FLAC in-game music (for use with Aleph One): 1drv.ms/f/s!AuD0MykSsmaRqmPm-N3SlVYZPEj2?e=lhtbHI
FLAC OST (for use in external music players): 1drv.ms/u/s!AuD0MykSsmaRnUJawmCYx8my2zSS?e=9rRYFa

1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 18

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

i’ve been overly optimistic about this so many times that i stopped announcing release dates, but we’re tentatively planning to open up Tempus Irae Redux for wider testing next week. please let me know if you’re interested. we’re not *quite* at release candidate stage yet, but we’re getting very, very close – at most a small handful of levels need more than cursory work at this point. i’d like to have at least a month or two of open testing before we put a “finished” stamp on the game.

to be clear: Redux is not meant to supplant the original Tempus Irae; to put it in musical terms, it’s an extended remix rather than a remaster. some levels are relatively faithful to the originals; others are greatly expanded or are almost unrecognizable in places. levels have been combined, new levels have been added, secrets have been made un-secret. the original Tempus Irae will continue to be available on Nardo’s website as it always has been. Redux isn’t The New Tempus Irae; it’s The Tempus Irae That Might’ve Been, Had Aleph One 1.6 Existed in 1997.

let me know if you’re interested in testing, and i’ll put you on a list of people who’ll receive some additional information soon™. note that it would be helpful to have some way to contact you directly, such as a Discord account (strongly preferred) or email address.

2 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 11

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

I am pleased to announce that Eternal 1.3 preview 5 is now available: eternal.bungie.org/development

The major changes since preview 4 mostly fall into two categories:

- Fixes to several major bugs, including:
— Occasional crashes in six different levels (“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”, “The World Is Hollow”, “The Land in the Sky”, “Floating in the Void”, “We Met Once in the Garden”, “Where Giants Have Fallen”)
— The HUD not displaying the inventory correctly (or at all) in non-16:9 aspect ratios
— Problems with the secret counter in network games
— Problems with the map overlay in network games

- Music. Over an hour of new music (parts of my new album See You Starside¹ make appearances in altered forms), plus tweaks and refinements to several existing mixes. The soundtrack still isn't done, but it's now over six hours long and features the work of thirteen different arrangers and composers. I’d like to thank everyone who’s worked on the soundtrack; it’s not common for a game to have this much music that’s entertaining to listen to, but – as biased as I undoubtedly am – I think Eternal pulls it off.

Less noteworthy, but still worth mentioning:

- A few levels have new secrets.
- We changed the Jjaro slime to look less like the toxic M1 Pfhor sludge.

I wasn’t actually planning to release another preview so soon after preview 4, but I was notified of most of these bugs after its release, and my music production outpaced my ability to fix and especially to playtest the bugs (several of them were related to cooperative play, so the latter depended on tester availability). Since several of these bugs are game-breaking, I felt it was essential to fix them quickly.

One caveat: I’m not sure if you’ll be able to resume your saved game from preview 4. If you need help with this, let me know, though Discord is by far the most reliable method for this since it allows for real-time communication and attached files; my contact info is listed in the readme. (That said, if you’re going for 100% secrets, you might want to start over anyway, since one of the levels with new secrets is fairly early .)

Enjoy!

—

¹See aaronfreed.github.io/aaronfreed/discography.html for download links for both personal listening and for use within Marathon 1, though I emphatically recommend against using it for a first playthrough. The YouTube upload is at https://youtu.be/bRiDh3PziWU, but I equally emphatically recommend using an adblocker, since YouTube has unilaterally decided to implement ads that I do not want on my videos without so much as the courtesy of giving me some of the revenue.

2 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 11

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

It came to my attention when I watched my video of _my own arrangement album_ that YouTube is now putting ads on my videos. Which is an utterly infuriating way to find out about it.

Let me make this perfectly clear: I didn’t run these ads, don’t want them on my videos, and don’t make a single cent from them. I will never monetise this channel for multiple reasons, chief among them:

1. I hate watching ads on other people’s videos.
2. Too much of what I post is other people’s gameplay, and I have no desire to profit from it.
3. The very concept of advertising leaves me feeling mildly uncomfortable under the best of circumstances and nauseates me under the worst.

This would be a ‘mildly uncomfortable’ case if Alex Seropian had put in a copyright claim, since he wrote the songs originally. I could live with that. But there’s been no copyright claim on my video; this is just YouTube being leeches. I probably put close to a hundred hours into arranging, mixing, and mastering this album, and Google is the one profiting from it? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’? Do you skidmarks in humanity’s collective underwear even remember?

Anyhow, I strongly encourage use of an adblocker for any and all videos on my channel¹ and apologise for any and all ads YouTube puts there – they bother me just as much as they bother you, maybe more. Plus, YouTube might be a convenient way to listen to music, but you’re getting subpar quality out of it. Grab the FLAC download in my video description and use that instead.


¹The sole possible exceptions: other people’s music, like the ‘metal remasters & vinyl rips’ playlist – but now I’m left doubting whether any of the ad revenue on those would go to the musicians who created the music either.

2 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 22

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

So, hi. Sorry for the lack of posts/videos lately. I’ve been working on several projects, though.

First, in case you missed it, Apotheosis X 1.1 is now out! Director hypersleep had this to say:

“Here's a few highlights for the update:


* Sound effects are louder and punchier, with more variety.
* The player's arsenal is more powerful, with many adjustments that make it more effective on total carnage.
* Additional saves, items and resources throughout the campaign.
* Weapon and item pickups are more visible.
* Numerous bug fixes, including the removal of 2 soft locks.
* Numerous small updates to level designs.
* Included PDF manual with a weapon manifest and additional backstory.


An extensive list of updates is available in the download. I want to shout out aaron in particular this time around for his efforts with updating the sound mix. It's now a suitably fat and punchy accompaniment to the carnage. A lot of people gave helpful feedback and flagged bugs, and this is reflected in many places throughout the update.”

Also on the horizon (as in, they’ll probably be out in no longer than a week) are updates for hellpak vol. 1 (which will _hopefully_ be the final one) and Eternal, both of which fix major bugs, and the latter of which introduces over an hour of new music. Eternal will also make the use of Aleph One 1.6 (released on 2022-11-26) a hard requirement, since it introduces important new scripting features that are outright required for bug fixes; indeed, it will yell at you if you’re using an older version. Work on Tempus Irae Redux and Where Monsters Are in Dreams also continues (slowly, but the former is likely to pick up considerably once the hellpak and Eternal updates are out).

And lastly, I’ve just about put the finishing touches on new arrangements of Marathon’s entire OST. My goal was for it to sound like a ’70s progressive rock album recorded in the ’80s, with arrangements from a ’90s Japanese game composer. Secondary influences on the album include genres as diverse as jazz, classical, blues, post-rock, metal, jazz, and disco. Most songs are more than twice the length of their original tracks, and I’ve written new parts for almost all of them; the album is 79 minutes compared to the OST’s 40. I won’t be putting it on YouTube until I’ve finalised the mix, but you can grab a preview from 1drv.ms/u/s!AuD0MykSsmaRph-QWQl1PmXFYmsh?e=qrMk9B or my entire discography from aaronfreed.github.io/aaronfreed/discography.html After finishing this, I plan to begin in earnest a series of pseudo-symphonic remakes of the OST. (Unfortunately, I can’t afford to hire a real symphony, so we’ll have to make do with the Logic/GarageBand instruments.)

Enjoy!

2 years ago | [YT] | 16

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

Aleph One 1.6 has been released. It contains some important bug fixes and new scripting features; as a result, subsequent releases of Eternal and, in all likelihood, Tempus Irae Redux will outright require it. A complete list of changes can be found at the Aleph One GitHub: github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/releases/ta…

Note that this is not the “dynamic lighting” release; that won’t be until version 2.0, which isn’t even guaranteed to be the next release (there might be a 1.7 in the interim).

Also, ICYMI, we released Eternal 1.3 preview 4 a few days ago: eternal.bungie.org/development. If you grabbed it in the first day it was out, you might want to re-download it, since a physics bug resulted in the players’ grenades dealing no damage in several early levels. This is now fixed, hopefully in such a way that you won’t need to restart your save. Let me know if you have any issues

Along similar “bug fix” lines, there have been two major bug fixes to hellpak: simplici7y.com/items/dungeons-hellpak-vol-1-not-re…. Anyone who started version 42069.0 or version 42069.1 and wishes to play the entire game should contact me or tbcr on the Discord about getting your saves to work with the current release – in all likelihood, you *will not* get the ending of the game if you don’t. Apologies for the inconvenience, which is why we’re offering to upgrade people’s saves.

2 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 17

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

Eternal 1.3 Preview 4 has been released: eternal.bungie.org/development/

This is the first new update in almost five months. New features since Preview 3 include, but are probably not limited to:

* A massively expanded soundtrack that now runs for more than four and half hours and includes work by eleven different arrangers
* A reshuffled third chapter, including a (mostly) new level, “The Midpoint of Somewhere”
* A complete remake of the Pfhor texture set
* A new secret tracking system
* Hundreds of gorgeous new terminal images
* A new “quick save on level transition” feature
* Numerous refinements and fixes to design, writing, and characterisation throughout the game
* A complete refactor of the game’s scripting

To be clear, this is not the final release of Eternal 1.3, but unless some catastrophic bug escaped us in testing, it will be the final update this year. I plan to focus on finishing off Tempus Redux (hopefully for an end-of-the-year release, but I’m known for being extremely optimistic with release dates, so take that with a boulder of salt) and then Where Monsters Are in Dreams, then hopefully return to Eternal with fresh eyes. I also plan for these to be the last major level revisions, but who knows how I’ll feel when I return to it.


Enjoy!

2 years ago | [YT] | 11

Marathon Vidmaster Challenge & Occasional Metal

Hellpak Vol. 1: Not Recommended by Doctors has been officially released:

simplici7y.com/items/dungeons-hellpak-vol-1-not-re…

I’ll probably have more videos of this (and of Apotheosis X, for that matter) in a few days, but I’m leaving for vacation later today, so I can’t promise to post them before I leave.

Apologies for the delay – I take about 75% of the responsibility for it. But at least the number of projects on my “to be released” list is steadily decreasing!

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3 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 9