Sometime in early 1995, one Jim Banister came into my office with four or five floppy discs in his hand. He said "You have a Mac. I need to install some software on it." This struck me as very odd, because Jim wasn't part of the IT dept. He was our Director of Post Production. But we were friends and I trusted him, so I didn't ask questions. When he was finished he said "Have fun!" or something to that effect and left. I peered at my desktop to see what he'd installed and I noticed a new icon named "Marathon". From then on, Jim would often come into my office and ask "So are you playing Marathon??? Whaddaya think, are you digging it? How far are you? Do you like it? Did you like the part where _____?" And so on and so forth. He was really into it. After a week or so, Jim and I and few other Mac users decided to invest in some serial numbers so we could play multiplayer matches over the LAN. We'd stay after work and have tournaments. We even came in on Saturdays occasionally. Eventually, some weird software issue cropped up whereby all of our organization's Macs were needed by a particular dept. and so ours were repurposed and replaced by Windows PCs. As none of us were savvy enough at the time to know that Marathon 2 was being ported to Windows, that was the end of our Marathon careers. Perhaps a year later, Banister left the organization. A couple of years later I heard that he had become some sort of multimedia guru, specializing in networked digital media for Warner Bros. and Disney. I began to wonder if he had an ulterior motive for doling out Marathon to every Mac user he could find. Was it something he was researching at the time? I don't know, but interestingly enough, I checked up to see what he was up to a couple of weeks ago, and wouldn't you know it? His current project is something called Spectrum Media Works, and he's partnered up with none other than Alex Seropian, co-founder of Bungie, co-creator of Marathon. Don't that beat all?

Gamertag: Druffmaul

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