Marathon Durandal to get Multiplayer / Cooperative expansion pack!

During the latest Retronauts podcast - which you can download here - included a Post Mort-em on Marathon: Durandal for the Xbox Live Arcade with Bruce Morrison of Freeverse. Some interesting tidbits come out of it, read on! Please note these aren't quotes, and have been cleaned up for reading purposes:

On why they released Marathon Durandal and not Infinity or the original:

The official reason is "we could only get one shot at this, and let's go with the good one" and Marathon 2 was released on Windows, so we thought that might be some leverage with Microsoft, though it did come out on the Microsoft Pippin.

Other reasons include Dual Shot guns and Marathon Infinity - Nobody knows what's going on in Infinity at all. If they claim they do they're lying! Marathon 1 is also really tiny - extremely tiny. The levels are small and cramped and dark.

Unofficial reason was that our tech demo was the level "Thunderdome" - we just happened to have the map on our hard drive, I guess.

On Marathon Infinity on XBLA:

I don't know if there is room on XBLA for Infinity - maybe if they end up releasing Final Doom and Doom 2. It's already filling it's niche - if people want it or not. I'd be totally down to do it, but I don't know if Microsoft want it or not. There hasn't been an M rated title on the platform since our game either. I'm surprised there even is an M rating on Marathon.

Originally in the first design documents we intended to allow Infinity to be downloadable as DLC for Durandal, but scrapped it because - at the time - XBLA DLC couldn't add any new achievements. They can now, but it really needs it's own game.

They also unofficially announced that Marathon Durandal will be be getting brand new Downloadable Content in the future!

Speaking of the Multiplayer - deathmatch style - We do have a content pack in the works for Marathon which will be taking some stuff from Infinity and bringing it over - more like things like Duality, Beyond Thunderdome, some of the Yarra(sp?) Levels. That's actually one of my meetings for GDC!

Looks like Infinity or the original are in the works at the moment, so look out for the Multiplayer / Coop expansion of Marathon soon! Who knows what else the expansion might also include?

Source: 1up.com's Retronauts podcast