Marathon 2 & Infinity’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 2 and Marathon Infinity’s palettes, 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 the remaining 14-color ramps roughly from brightest to darkest.
  • 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. ⬤ #E1DDC3
   4. ⬤ #FFFF00
   5. ⬤ #FBAF8B
   6. ⬤ #00FF00
   7. ⬤ #39E48B
   8. ⬤ #99C300
   9. ⬤ #A4ADEB
   10. ⬤ #CFA093
   11. ⬤ #00B0C9
   12. ⬤ #F65800
   13. ⬤ #FF0000
   14. ⬤ #618961
   15. ⬤ #AB4A12
   16. ⬤ #245FA3
   17. ⬤ #B0005E
   18. ⬤ #0C00FF
   19. ⬤ #0000FF (dummy transparency colors)

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The Color Palette

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