I posted back in 2019 about how I’d been going by “VirtualWolf” online for twenty years at that point, and that the earliest mention of that name was from a Myth II map I’d created called Realm of the VirtualWolf that I’d been unable to find the actual original map file for (and that there was one Marathon map I couldn’t find either).
Fast forward to a couple of weekends ago when I decided to poke around and see if there had been any more updates to Project Magma’s work on Myth II, and it turns out that they’ve released two huge projects that included a re-render of every single model and asset for both Myth I and Myth II (from the original 3D models no less), as well as an update to the Myth I campaign to bring it into line with the improvements from Myth II.
I also decided to see what the Aleph One folks had been up to (the open-source release of Marathon) and while poking around various Marathon sites, I discovered this absolutely incredible treasure trove on archive.org that had been uploaded two years ago and I somehow missed until now: a RIDICULOUSLY LARGE archive of almost three thousand third-party Marathon maps that had been created over the years!
This “for all time” Marathon archive is from a hard drive purchased at the estate sale of a man who died early May 2023. I was always a fan of the Bungie Software game series Marathon so I was delighted to connect the drive and find lots of cool apps and files, along with a folder named “The Marathon Maps”.
After examining the maps collection, it was clear that all these Marathon maps and files were curated since the release of the original Marathon 1 app, which was December 1994. Yes, in the meantime the old man who owned the hard drive collected almost every Marathon map ever made.
And the big difference in what he’s done is the fact that all folders, Read Mes, and maps are professionally named and organized: no cryptic, uninformative, or baffling titles, and no separated Read Mes. Plus, all Read Mes are cleanly formatted in the header, with date, author, and map name.
And even better, this same gentleman had also collected a trove of Myth maps as well, uploaded separately here, and my “Realm of the VirtualWolf” map was included! 🤯
Sadly the missing Marathon map continues to be missing (technically it’s two, but one of them I had converted for use with Marathon Evil so it’s essentially the same thing; I think I must have just updated the original file rather than duplicating it, and apparently the original missed the attention of Old Man Map Collector) but all the other ones I I’d already found myself and uploaded to archive.virtualwolf.org were included in the archive, which is pretty incredible.
I’m absolutely stoked that I was finally able to find the Myth II map and I’ve dutifully added it to archive.virtualwolf.org, though I still can’t figure out how I don’t have it in my home directory because fucking everything is still in my home directory (for example I have a school assignment from 1994 when I was in primary school 😛). Ah well!