Marathon 1
Marathon 1 MIDI files
Direct Exports from QuickTime
Original MIDI files. Note that all files are 60 bpm 4/4, owing to how QuickTime stored MIDI data in .mov files (which is what Marathon’s soundtrack actually used).
Quantized Marathon 1 MIDIs
Quantized files with the correct tempi and time signatures.
(Still forthcoming: Non-quantized files with the correct tempi and time signatures.)
Marathon 1 Remixes
Craig Hardgrove’s site has a massive number of these. Except as noted, the following aren’t on his site, and unless otherwise noted, they all contain at least one remix of every track in Marathon 1’s OST:
QuickTime 2.0/2.5 stereo
QuickTime 2.0 in the left channel, QuickTime 2.5 in the right. Technically, these could be counted as my second remixes of the OST (I released them on 2021-02-03), but I’ve listed them first because they’re so similar in sound to the OST that they barely qualify as remixes.
Aaron Freed’s QuickTime 2.5 remixes (1997)
My first remixes. Extremely faithful to the original sound, adding only stereo, reverb, new instruments, and a few other flourishes.
- YouTube
- FLAC
- Ogg Vorbis
- See also my complete discography
Tobacco (2001-07-24)
Upmastered FLAC. Contains the following eight tracks:
- Chomber
- Fat Man
- Flowers in Heaven
- Landing
- Leela
- Rushing
- Splash (Marathon)
- Swirls
Wonderful remakes that add some tasteful – and tasty – new instrumental parts.
Chibi-usa (2002-03-11)
Upmastered FLAC. Tasteful reorchestrations with a higher-quality synthesizer.
Cannibal Whore Feast (2003-08-12)
Upmastered FLAC. Contains the following eight tracks:
- Aliens Again
- Flippant
- Freedom
- Guardians
- New Pacific
- New Pacific (reprise)
- Rapture
- What About Bob?
Like Chibi-usa’s, these are tasteful reorchestrations with a higher-quality synthesizer. And you can combine these with Tobacco’s for another complete set of remixes.
Eternal X (2008-02-23 to present)
First released 2008-02-23⁽¹⁾ and has grown and expanded with each 1.x release.
Eternal X 1.2 OST (2018-12-21⁽²⁾)
by Dr Craig Hardgrove, Tommy T-Bone, Nicholas Singer, & Eike Steffen
featuring compositions by Alexander Seropian, Marty O’Donnell, & Michael Salvatori
Upmastered FLAC. Craig’s site has the Ogg Vorbis files (but if you have Eternal X 1.2 or 1.2.1, you already have most of these anyway) and a link to the YouTube video. These may remain the most famous and acclaimed remakes of the OST; if not, they’re probably neck-and-neck with CKT’s.
Eternal X 1.3 (WIP, likely to be released sometime in 2025)
by Aaron Freed, Dr Craig Hardgrove, wowbobwow, Talashar, CKT1138, Solar‑Tron, Dan Storm, Matrix_XV, Tommy T-Bone, Nicholas Singer, Trey J. Anderson, & Eike Steffen
featuring compositions by Alexander Seropian, Marty O’Donnell, & Michael Salvatori, & Chris Christodoulou
Over seven hours of music by some thirteen contributors drawing mostly from Marathon 1’s soundtrack. There’s some overlap with several composers’ work below, but many tracks have been revised, remixed, or remastered for Eternal 1.3, and since they frequently segue seamlessly into one another, you probably won’t have heard most of them in these exact configurations before. The OST has been updated and expanded substantially even in recent months, and several of its mixes are unique to Eternal 1.3.
There are two different versions of this soundtrack, which should not be confused as they serve different purposes:
- Original Soundtrack (OST): FLAC/upmastered FLAC (depending on track). Meant for listening outside the game; the quietest sections are left at their original volume levels, and tracks that loop in-game will loop past the loop point and then fade out. The level music for “We Met Once in the Garden” (which changes over the course of the level dynamically based on in-game events) is combined into a single track. Filenames contain track numbers and spaces.
- In-game soundtrack: FLAC/upmastered FLAC (depending on track). For use in-game with 1.3 preview 6. Tracks that loop in-game will cut off suddenly if played in an audio player, and I made the quietest sections of a few tracks louder so they’ll be audible over the game sound effects. The level music for “We Met Once in the Garden” is split into three tracks. Tracks are grouped into folders, and the filenames are less useful.
Note that Eternal 1.3’s soundtrack incorporates tracks that appear in several other collections here, including Craig Hardgrove’s Somewhere in the Heavens, Talashar’s Eupfhoria, CKT1138 and Matrix_XV’s remixes, my 1997 remixes, and See You Starside (and its related albums).
Craig Hardgrove – Marathon: Somewhere in the Heavens (2011-07-18)
The bulk of Eternal’s soundtrack prior to 1.3, and still a major component of it in 1.3.
GarageBand source files & original exports (released 2024-01-15)
AIFF, M4A, MP3, & .band via Craig’s website. (The link to the source files on his downloads page actually just links to the original MP3 releases; he posted the correct link on his news page.)
2024-01-23 remaster
FLAC/upmastered FLAC: Remasters of higher-quality sources of seventeen tracks on Eternal X 1.2’s OST. Eleven tracks (listed alphabetically, with track numbers preceding them) have lossless AIFF sources:
- “Chomber”
- “Flippant”
- “Flowers in Heaven”
- “Guardians”
- “Landing”
- “Leela”
- “New Pacific (reprise)”
- “Rapture”
- “Rushing”
- “Swirls”
- “Swirls (piano)”
I’ve upmastered the other six, which were lossy M4A:
- “Aliens Again”
- “Fat Man”
- “Freedom”
- “New Pacific”
- “Splash (Marathon)”
- “What About Bob?”
In addition, I’ve declipped most tracks to mitigate clipping distortion. These are likely the highest-quality versions of these tracks I’ll be able to make until I’m able to re-export the original project files in GarageBand 1.1.0 and 3.0.5 sans clipping; however, a few project files have missing loops, and if we can’t locate them, I may be unable to remaster them all perfectly.
Will Christian (2016-10-17)
Some interesting, inventive takes. I wouldn’t have thought to rearrange ‘Leela’ as a metal track, but… somehow, it works.
Talashar – Eupfhoria (2018-11-18)
Bandcamp (stream, FLAC, other formats). Atmospheric reorchestrations that add new layers of harmony and melody, resulting in some fantastic twists on old classics.
CKT1138 (2021-03-12)
Faithful reorchestrations using vintage ’80s and early ’90s synthesizers, with a sound worthy of Vangelis’ Blade Runner OST on several tracks. To be honest, these are so well done that they’ve killed the entire concept of “faithful Marathon soundtrack remakes” stone-cold dead for me (which CKT later acknowledged as his exact intention – in general, that is, not for me specifically); I can’t imagine anyone ever topping them. My recent versions (see below) have had exactly the opposite aim from “faithful remake”.
Matrix_XV (2022-08-28)
Lush, generally faithful remakes with modern synthesizers, and the points of departure, like the Black Sabbath-inspired take on ‘Landing’, are superb.
Aaron Freed – See You Starside: The Marathon Soundtrack Reimagined (2023-02-04)
- FLAC (suitable for external music players) & Ogg Vorbis (suitable for in-game use)
- YouTube (if you watch this, please use an adblocker such as uBlock Origin, as I neither want advertisements on this video nor receive any money from them)
- My first drafts (from 2022-12-05), ’70s/’80s-style remixes inspired by Marathon’s ‘used future’ aesthetic
- Interim revisions
- My complete discography
My latest complete Marathon OST arrangement album, made from 2022-12 to 2021-01 in GarageBand. I’d already planned to take creative liberties with the OST’s sound when I started, but as I gained familiarity with GarageBand’s surprisingly robust feature set, I took steadily more, heavily expanding many tracks almost to a “complete rewrite” extent (See You Starside adds some thirty-eight minutes to the OST’s running time, and nine tracks are more than twice as long as the originals). Samples of Roland drum machines and Mellotrons are ubiquitous. This album’s primary influences are ’70s progressive rock, ’80s pop, ’90s Japanese game music, and ’90s/’00s post-rock; secondary influences include metal, jazz, blues, classical, disco, Gregorian chant, ambient, electronic music, and film and TV soundtracks. Its YouTube video has gotten over 300 likes and almost 10,000 views in just under two years – not bad for arrangements of an obscure old Mac soundtrack.
That’s hardly all, though – See You Starside spawned several spin-offs:
Aaron Freed – Violins Again: An Orchestral Marathon Soundtrack (2023-02-04)
FLAC. The above mixes’ ‘orchestral’ counterpart (though, as I can’t afford to hire an actual orchestra, it’s really every bit as synthetic). Most of the melodies are identical, but the instrumentation favours violins, harps, and pianos over guitars or synthesizers (though this is not a universal rule). Occasionally, the orchestra is more eastern (you’ll hear a koto on several tracks and a sitar on at least one), or may involve electric violins, viole, celli, or basses; unfortunately, we were unable to confirm the involvement of any electric light orchestrae. I don’t really like this title, but I never thought of a better one.
Aaron Freed – …And Beyond: The Marathon Future Symphonic Mixes (2023-02-04)
FLAC. The result of combining See You Starside with Violins Again. Honestly, I don’t really like this title either, but again, I never thought of anything better. The subtitle is at least justifiable in that, by the time Marathon takes place, genres like rock, jazz, and even hip-hop and metal may well be termed Classical music the way we colloquially call Baroque, Romantic, and even Modernist music ‘Classical’, even though the Classical period was properly only from ca. 1750 to ca. 1820.
Aaron Freed – See You Starside 2.0 (WIP)
WIP revisions of the above sets using Logic Pro and EastWest ComposerCloud+ instruments. I composed and arranged the above sets entirely in GarageBand and, with only four exceptions, used GarageBand or MainStage instruments – I wanted to show that it needn’t cost a fortune to make music that sounds good. (Violins Again and …And Beyond’s ‘Aliens Again’ and ‘Chomber’ use ComposerCloud+ instruments. MainStage is an entirely reasonable $50, and GarageBand comes free with every Mac.) I’m now revising them with professional-grade software and instrumentation, but note that several tracks currently have significant instrument balance issues; I’ll fix these in subsequent revisions.
PixelMations (2024)
I just found out this existed; I haven’t listened to it yet, and probably won’t have time to do so until at least 2024-12-25. I don’t know the exact date when it was released either, but it’s available on Simplici7y (and apparently also on Bandcamp, but the person who posted it didn’t include a link).
Your Name Here?
Several others (e.g., wowbobwow, Storm, dontask4470, Zesorath, & Myrzir) have begun but not yet finished what I sincerely hope will be complete sets of remixes of the entire OST. Search their names on the Discord and add ‘has: sound’ to find them.
Marathon 2 & Infinity Fan OSTs
Marathon 2 Fan OSTs
Marathon 2 Special Edition OST
by Mark Sumner (Zipper Cat), Mike Gorczynski (The Punisher), Cannibal Whore Feast (Iain McLaughlin), Julian Zielke (Mercenary), & MuShoo
The first complete Marathon 2 fan soundtrack. I think it was probably released between 2005 to 2007, but I don’t have any idea of the exact date. This was originally the soundtrack for the Marathon 2 Special Edition. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Marathon 2 Special Edition is. You have to see it for yourself.
- Upmastered FLAC plugin; save it in your Marathon 2 directory’s “Plugins” subdirectory to use it in-game (requires Aleph One 1.7 or later).
- I originally posted this remastered version on Discord.
Talashar – Feel the Noise (2024-09-16)
The second complete Marathon 2 fan soundtrack, released on 2024-09-16.
- An Ogg Vorbis version suitable for in-game use is available on Simplici7y.
- It’s also available on Steam Workshop.
- A FLAC version is available on Bandcamp.
Solar-Tron – The Solar Soundtrack for M2 (2024-12-21)
The third complete Marathon 2 fan soundtrack, released on 2024-12-21; version 1.1 (released 2025-01-01) included some bug fixes and a few new music segments, and version 1.2 (released 2025-01-07) included some EQ tweaks and additional bug fixes. It incorporates several novel dynamic music elements that had not been incorporated to this extent in any project available at the time of its release.
Unfortunately, I suspect that using it probably disables Steam achievements for the rest of any save it was used in, since its dynamic music features incorporate Lua scripting, and to my knowledge, use of any Lua script categorically disables Steam achievements for the remainder of any save where the script was used, regardless of whether it had any effect on gameplay or conferred any advantages whatsoever to players. (Solar-Tron began this project long before Steam achievements existed.)
- A plugin suitable for in-game use is available on Simplici7y
- A FLAC version is available on Bandcamp
- You can also stream it on YouTube
Marathon Infinity Fan OSTs
Talashar – Strange Aeons (2024-04-10)
Talashar released Strange Aeons, the first complete Marathon Infinity fan soundtrack, on 2024-04-10.
- An Ogg Vorbis version suitable for in-game use is available on Simplici7y.
- It’s also available on Steam Workshop.
- A FLAC version is available on Bandcamp; one track is from Eupfhoria, found above.
Mod OSTs
In rough chronological order (I don’t know Trojan’s exact release date, and there are conflicting sources on Excalibur 1.0’s). Eternal is with the Marathon 1 remixes, as that’s most of what it contains.
Trojan (1997-06)
by Tom Worth, John Carlo Maffei, Jason Aguiar, Steve Campbell, and Hamish Sanderson
I never got into Trojan, except for its OST. (Ironic, as I worked on the Standalone Edition.) Tom Worth in particular has an uncanny knack for composing tracks that, by all rights, should be maddeningly repetitive, but his command of melody and rhythm is so sublime that it’s all but impossible not to surrender to the groove.
These are technically remastered, but they sound almost the same as the originals apart from having slightly more dynamic range (and the originals were already very dynamic).
Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge
Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge 1.0 OST (1997-06⁽³⁾)
I never got into EMR either, but this soundtrack goes unreasonably hard – it’s full of catchy, clever, memorable melodies that interweave beautifully with each other. The 3.0 soundtrack is probably even better, though it doesn’t give me the same nostalgia kick.
FLAC. Mostly composed by James Bisset, except:
- “Jurassic Carmina” is an arrangement of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” (Carmina Burana, 1937-06-08)
- “The Raptor Sleeps” is an arrangement of Solomon Linda & the Evening Birds’ 1939 single “Mbube” (from the Zulu imbube, meaning lion), best known to the Western world from the Weavers’ 1961 cover of it as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (which is the primary basis of the arrangement).
Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge 3.0 OST (2007-05-29)
by James Bisset, Bill Catambay, Bob Chamot, Dane Smith, Solra Bizna, Mark Sumner, et al.
Upmastered FLAC (mostly; three tracks are still MP3s because upmastering them wouldn’t have restored any dynamic range or high-frequency audio data). These are entirely different arrangements and, often, songs. I also don’t know many of their correct titles or composers, but neither did EMR3’s creators.
Marathon Phoenix (2010-06-15⁽⁴⁾)
by CryoS & Kevin MacLeod
Yes, that Kevin MacLeod. And his work is every bit as good as you’d expect – and CryoS’ is just as good. Some dude on YouTube wrote that CryoS and MacLeod:
provided some superb, extremely diverse work. “Animosity” is worthy of Vangelis’ Blade Runner OST; “Chronological” should be the final movement of a seven-part Genesis epic; “Babylon” is absolutely gorgeous and would’ve fit beautifully on Yasunori Mitsuda’s Chrono Cross OST; “Misuse” could be a chart-topping club banger from an alternate timeline; and so on.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. :-)
- YouTube
- upmastered FLAC (a few of these tracks may be older versions)
- MP3 & remastered sounds (Phoenix 1.4.x includes all of this but the remastered title theme & sounds)
dungeons presents hellpak (2022–)
dungeons presents hellpak: Vol. 1 – Not Recommended by Doctors (2022-09-19⁽⁵⁾)
by tbcr, Matrix_XV, CKT1138, & NEFX
As the person that mastered this soundtrack, I’m admittedly biased, but nonetheless, it is a truth universally acknowledged that hellpak’s OST slaps.
- YouTube (note: this is part of the hellpak gameplay)
- upmastered FLAC
dungeons presents hellpak: Vol. 2 – An Exercise in Questionable Taste (WIP, to be released 2025)
by Matrix_XV, tbcr, CKT1138, Aaron Freed, & NEFX
FLAC. (Note: As this currently contains over seven hours of music and some 130 tracks, only around 30% of what’s in here will make it into the final release.)
Apotheosis X (2022-10-31)
by hypersleep
I admit to sometimes being a little bit jealous that hypersleep is so very good at so many things. One person shouldn’t be this good at level design and art and music and… (On normal days, I just feel fortunate to get to work on projects with developers of such depth and breadth of skill.)
Upmastered FLAC. (YouTube video forthcoming pending creation of artwork.)
Tempus Irae Redux (WIP, to be released early 2025)
by Aaron Freed, Alexander Nakarada, Rafael Krux, Kevin MacLeod, Chris Christodoulou, Nine Inch Nails, Bryan Teoh, Brian Boyko, CKT1138, Sean Magee, Rich Wilcox, & Fungus Amongus
FLAC or upmastered FLAC. The track list remains to be finalized, since I’m still revising my tracks (and, in fact, still writing new ones), but I’m likely to have around ninety minutes of music on what looks set to be a roughly four-hour OST. (Readers may also be interested in my commentary on Compositions 2023-2024, which contains two hellpak vol. 2 tracks and the first thirteen tracks I wrote with Tempus Irae Redux in mind, though currently, only five of the latter are slated to be included. At some point, I plan to write detailed commentary for my newer Tempus Irae Redux tracks, which will appear on a completely different album – Compositions 2023-2024 already exceeds two and a half hours in length.)