Marathon (1994)’s 8-bit Color Palettes

Strictly speaking, as far as I’m aware, none of the Marathon games had predefined 256-color palettes; they simply built the palette ad-hoc from what was in their shapes files, with the small problem that if you tried to use more than 256 colors, they’d crash. This is no longer necessary with Aleph One, but if you care about 8-bit software mode at all, it’s still worth adhering to the predefined palettes.

ShapeFusion (the modern replacement for Bungie’s shapes editor, Anvil) doesn’t actually check whether you’re using colors adhering to the shapes’ standard color palette. As a result, if you use it to generate a color ramp, the colors it creates may or may not actually adhere to your shapes file’s pre-existing colors. If you generate a ramp of the same length from the same exact colors every time, its contents will be consistent with each other every time, but they may not adhere to Bungie’s colors.

I’ve thus compiled Marathon (1994)’s palette, in both web color and RGB formats. A few notes:

• I’ve indexed the “white to black” color ramp first, then the “black body” color ramp, then a faintly blue 17-color ramp, then the remaining 14-color ramps roughly from brightest to darkest, and finally a dark four-color ramp that seems to be entirely isolated.
  • Rows’ backgrounds are their colors; whether the text is black or white depends on contrast.
• Every color ramp ended with black; I only included it the first time.
• The last three colors (#0000FF, #FF00FF, and #00FFFF) are “dummy colors” used to signify transparency and don’t actually appear anywhere in the game; I’ve included them for completeness’ sake.

As always, please contact me if you notice any errors or omissions; see my introductory and advanced mapmaking pages and annotated Anvil help balloons for more context.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Table of Contents
3. The Color Palette
   1. ⬤ #FFFFFF
   2. ⬤ #FEF495 (black body ramp)
   3. ⬤ #C1C6EA (seventeen-color light blue ramp)
   4. ⬤ #FFE716
   5. ⬤ #E1DDC3
   6. ⬤ #FBAF8B
   7. ⬤ #00FF00
   8. ⬤ #FFD39B
   9. ⬤ #39E48B
   10. ⬤ #C7AB9B
   11. ⬤ #00B0C9
   12. ⬤ #FF0012
   13. ⬤ #618961
   14. ⬤ #B36E1A
   15. ⬤ #9B4AEE
   16. ⬤ #A10064
   17. ⬤ #0C00FF
   18. ⬤ #3A445C (isolated four-color ramp)
   19. ⬤ #0000FF (dummy transparency colors)

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The Color Palette

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