I recently acquired the most rare item in my collection, and I thought I would write a little bit about the journey I underwent to collect it. I first became interested in buying Super Marathon two years ago when I started to get more into the collecting scene. I had been collecting retro games since '09, but living in Australia had yielded limited opportunities for me. I had to limit myself to only buying a few retro games and a maximum of one new console per year, because the cost was exponentially higher than in other countries like the US and Japan. It was only when I moved to Tokyo in late 2013 that I was able to realise my full collecting potential, and buy whatever I wanted with virtually no holds barred. My discovery of Yahoo Auctions was also extremely helpful, mostly because of the insane deals I could get in comparison to Australia, but also because of how quickly I would receive items. Looking back on my collecting habits in Australia, I can't believe that I bought a Super Famicom off of eBay for the equivalent of $50 USD now when I can walk into any HardOff in Tokyo and buy one for less than 500 yen. Upon finding a complete-in-box Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete for a decent price, I decided on making pre-Halo Bungie games one of the main focuses of my collection (minus Oni and Myth, as I never cared much for either). I had no idea that there even existed a version of Marathon for the Apple Bandai Pippin until a few years ago. I knew that the Pippin existed, but I didn't know whether or not it was a Japan exclusive, what games it had, or when it was even released. I guess I just never saw much of a reason to look into it. But once I started to research Bungie's old titles, I discovered Super Marathon and decided that I had to have it in order to claim that my collection was 'complete'. I only just recently set myself some more solid collection goals, because a user here by the name of bombman gave me some information about Japanese versions of other Bungie games that I probably will never be able to find, so I’ll be setting them as extras to my collection if I ever find them (Pathways into Darkness and ZPC, but there might be more that I don't know about yet). My journey first began when I contacted a man by the name of Bruce Morrison (known as hippieman on Assemblergames and DigitPress). Bruce worked on the port of Marathon 2: Durandal to the Xbox 360 via XBLA while at FreeVerse. He was hunting the game back in 2010, and I read both of his threads on DigitPress and Assemblergames, as well as his post on FreeVerse's old blog via the Wayback Machine (since the website doesn't exist anymore). From these repositories of information I gathered that if anyone would be able to help me track down the game, it was him. I then proceeded to try to obtain contact details of his, but I eventually found him on LinkedIn and promptly sent him a message. Although he wasn't willing to sell me the copy that he managed to find, he did give me a lot of useful information in order to help me track down the game. Bruce told me about how there used to be hundreds of copies of Super Marathon in David Joost's garage once (an ex-marketing guy for Bungie), but that they had to be destroyed for tax reasons. To be quite honest, hearing that gutted me and made me think that I'd never find myself a copy. After receiving Bruce's reply, I then reached out to Alex Seropian (co-founder of Bungie and creator of my all-time favourite game, Gnop!) and Alex Rosenberg (former Apple, Lucasfilm, and Bungie employee. He was involved in the creation of Super Marathon). Seropian's reply was light-hearted, simply stating that my collection was 'cool' and that he wasn't sure that he could help me with my current quest. Although it was nice of him to reply, I was rather disappointed that he wasn't very willing to help out. He's obviously a much busier man than I, and I understand that, however part of me wishes that he could have provided more of an insight as to exactly why this game was so rare. As far as I understand, porting Macintosh software to the Apple Bandai Pippin was relatively simple and could be completed in a short period of time. To me, it would have made sense for Bungie to print many more copies of the game than I have been led to believe, due to low development costs and the short amount of time the project would have taken to complete. If advertising for the game was pushed harder, the Pippin might have had more of a user base and a greater potential as home system. Rosenberg's reply was, similarly to Seropian's, very straight to the point. But what he had to say was much more exciting; he had sent some emails (I assume) to several people to see if they had kept copies. He also told me that he had a shrink-wrapped one, but from what Bruce said in his message he valued it more sentimentally than financially, which was something that I took to heart for the remainder of my search. After all of my leads going cold shortly after talking to the three gatekeepers of my paradisiacal object, I gave up my search for a time to work on my micro Street Fighter 2 replica machine. Upon my return, I started with some simple Google searches. I found that one of the easiest ways to find potential locations of the game was to do a Google image search, and follow the links to the various forums and websites that I found photos of Super Marathon on. In doing this, I managed to find a photo of a boxless jewel-case copy of the game on a collecting website called CollectedIt. I messaged the owner several times until he responded with a price of $5000, to which I virtually screamed in horror. I had finally found someone 100% willing to sell me the game, but it was for an absolutely insane price that I wouldn't even pay if I were rich. Using the same method, I also found an old Reddit thread on r/bungie by a user called ChrisBNG who was searching for some old Bungie games. The last post in this thread was by a user who claimed to own a sealed copy of Super Marathon that he got in a bag of swag (sold by Bungie for their 20th anniversary in 2011. It was essentially a sack filled with different goodies leftover from Halo and other games, such as Marathon), and even provided photographic evidence of it. I immediately went to work formulating a heartfelt message to him and sent it off, only to be greeted with what can be summarised as "it's valuable, but I don't know how valuable, so I'm not going to sell it until I know the correct price". I decided to give him some time. But as days turned into weeks and months, I quickly realised that he had no real intent of letting it go to me. I sent him one final message with an offer of $700 (which seems crazy now that I think about it, but I was desperate and knew that I could come up with the money relatively quickly), to which he responded with a resounding 'no'. As I begun to get more creative with my search terms, I managed to come across a rather obscure forum called Open Carnage, seemingly dedicated to Halo and Marathon multiplayer. There was a recent thread there from 2013 where an admin, As7raios, posted a photo of his sealed copy of the game. So just like with the Reddit user, I sent him a message. To my surprise he responded almost instantly saying that he would be more than happy to sell me the game; I was ecstatic to say the least! We sorted out a price that suited both of us (a very good price, might I add) and then I sent him the money and received the package's tracking number. We continued to talk about various different things such as the MCC, Halo, and Bungie right up until the game arrived a few days ago. As soon as I opened it, I sent him some photos and got to work on writing this article/blog post/mind-outlet. As7raios' copy was also received in one of Bungie's bags of swag back in 2011. So thus ends the epicly long-winded tale of how I came across what I believe to be one of the rarest retail games of all time. As of writing this piece, I know of only 5 sealed copies including mine. There are also 4 opened copies; 3 without the box in just a jewel case, and 1 with the box as well, owned by a user here I believe. I saw two of the jewel-case ones in a big Pippin eBay auction that sold for very little considering what everything in it was worth, and the other was in an auction by itself. Here is a list of the owners of the sealed copies: - Alex Rosenberg (the original owner of his copy) - Bruce Morrison (received from Alex Okita) - wchamilt (on Reddit, received from Bungie) - unknown competition winner, as per Bruce's information And then of course, there's me. Spoiler Spoiler Thanks for reading, I'm surprised you made it all the way down here! My collection is nearing its end, with only 5 more American and 2 more Japanese games to go. For a full list of everything that I'm still on the hunt for, click here. If you have ANY idea where I can find any of said remaining games, please contact me. You can check everything that I've collected so far here.
I admire your dedication. Do you ever plan on trying to get a non-sealed or jewel case copy just to play with or nah?
Nah, I'm not going to bother doing that. The ISOs are legally available online anyway, but that isn't to say that if I randomly came across an opened copy I wouldn't still buy it
Pretty much! But I got a LinkedIn message from Alex Seropian this morning that made me shit my pants; he said that he might have a copy of Operation: Desert Storm to give me. Although he worded it strangely, I think that he told me he wanted me to make a donation to the MS Society in America in exchange for the game...
Thanks for sharing your story. I can appreciate the dedication (obsession? ) with finding a personal holy grail! Congrats.
Very cool collection! Congratulations on finally finding something you'd been searching so long for. And I say, take Seropian up on his offer! He's always seemed a pretty amiable guy to me.
Thanks! And trust me, I'm definitely going to be taking up his offer. I'm just slightly worried that I won't have the amount of money that I think he's going to request, because I really don't want to be out of pocket more than $500 USD right now... It sure was/is an obsession
I understand, DeChief. Still, no harm in saying "Great idea. Did you have an approximate donation size in mind?"
I sent him a reply implying rather directly that I'm not made of money, but that I'm more than happy to do it. It took him 2 days to reply to my last message so I just have to wait another 2 (hopefully) to see what he says.
Small update on Desert Storm: Alex is checking his storage trunk for the game around thanksgiving, as he's traveling to Chicago (where it's located) anyway. I've also asked him to check for the remaining American things I need: - Pathways Into Darkness 1st release CIB (or sealed, apparently it came in shrink-wrap) for Mac - Marathon 2: Durandal sealed for Mac - Marathon 1 CD version sealed for Mac - Operation: Desert Storm CIB (or maybe even sealed, if he has it!) for Mac
