Marathon (1994)’s 8-bit Color Palettes
Strictly speaking, as far as I’m aware, none of Bungie’s Marathon trilogy 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.
- Marathon 2 and Infinity used a somewhat different palette. Several color ramps remained identical between the games; a few others have some odd discrepancies (not counting black, the black-body ramp’s last color is
#270000 in Marathon 1 and #270101 in Marathon 2 and Infinity; not counting black, the last color of the #00B0C9 ramp is #000E0F in Marathon 1 and #001415 in Marathon 2 and Infinity).
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
- Introduction
- Table of Contents
- The Color Palette
- ⬤ #FFFFFF
- ⬤ #FEF495 (black body ramp)
- ⬤ #C1C6EA (seventeen-color light blue ramp)
- ⬤ #FFE716
- ⬤ #E1DDC3
- ⬤ #FBAF8B
- ⬤ #00FF00
- ⬤ #FFD39B
- ⬤ #39E48B
- ⬤ #C7AB9B
- ⬤ #00B0C9
- ⬤ #FF0012
- ⬤ #618961
- ⬤ #B36E1A
- ⬤ #9B4AEE
- ⬤ #A10064
- ⬤ #0C00FF
- ⬤ #3A445C (isolated four-color ramp)
- ⬤ #0000FF (dummy transparency colors)
Back to top · Table of contents · Contact me · Website index