Marathon 1 MIDI files (complete download!)

[djkontraktor]

Well, after scrounging around the bowels of the internet looking for information on abandoned Mac file formats of a time forgotten, I took it upon myself to see if I could generate modern-style MIDI files for all the original Marathon 1 songs in-game. As many of us know, the songs were originally in a variant of MIDI, encoded in one handy data file for Marathon to read. And, as we also know, almost nothing can read these files. Except..

Marathon Music Exploder, a program for Classic Macs. With the help of Basilisk II, a 68K Mac emulator, I ran MMC on the original release of Marathon. Lo and behold, out popped 16 different files. Now, these files had no extension, so I was about to abandon ship, because when I tried to add the .mid extension, every program claimed that the file had been corrupted. And, it *had*...
Except QuickTime could read these files. It played them back precisely in the screechy tone that QuickTime 3 users had known, and disabled "Background Music" after hearing. QuickTime Pro will also export any file opened. So, I exported all of these special Midi files to .MID, and voila! It worked, and now I have a database of these files ready to share with the world.
I sure wish I had all these Midis when I was doing my soundtrack remake for Marathon (see thread "Complete Marathon 1 Music Remaster")

So, here you go. Many music programs can import MIDI files and then you can assign your own instruments to each channel, and the rest is history.

***TRANSFER WHEN READY***
http://www.filedropper.com/marathon1midis

[JohannesG]

Oh shit, I was just wondering about this the other day when I saw your music remaster project thread. I remember finding these MIDI files probably over 10 or 15 years ago but was worried they had been affected by linkrot. Thank you for saving those.

You should maybe upload this to archive.org for the sake of the future. (edit: although I guess that possibility depends on the license on these files...)