On Marathon

Here we go.

One of my absolute favorite game trilogies ever made is really very old-school. Back in the day, when they were still cool, Bungie software consisted of a handful of guys making mac games out of their Chicago apartment. In the vein of Doom, this old sprite-based 2.5D first-person shooter frankly blew away Doom and all other competitors, but didn't sell nearly as well because at the time it was Mac-only; it made waves in the Mac gaming community, but outside of that it barely got noticed.

Today, the game can be played on almost any platform, with a little effort. Doesn't even cost money. Hooray!

Let's talk a little bit about what Marathon has that Doom did not - namely, a story. Sure, Doom had a basic plot, but Marathon's is so deep and convoluted that even today people are trying to tie up parts of it. The universe these games take place in is so well-developed, if you know where to look, and it puts most modern games to shame in that regard. This was in a time before cinematic cutscenes, or ingame scripted actions - everything that happened had to be done with the AI and clever level design. But Bungie added a great element to the game which singlehandedly has provided hungry fans with all the material they need to work with in order to try and suss out the intricacies of Marathon's universe - the computer terminal.

Each level in the games had at least one computer terminal, usually more in the area of six or seven of them. Walking up to these and pressing the action key would bring up a text-based terminal, often accompanied by some images, by which other characters could communicate with the player and give him instructions and sometimes teleport him to different locations. Instead of today's games, which present the player with scripted and interactive cutscenes, pre-rendered full-motion videos and the like, Marathon essentially presented the player with a book in between all the killing.

It's impossible to summarize the plots of all three games in the space I want to use, but the basics are this - you are (it is generally accepted) an enhanced Mjolnir mark IV cyborg (hmm, that sounds familiar, huh? More on that later...) defending the colony ship Marathon from alien slavers called the Pfhor who have invaded it. The colony ship departed Earth a long time ago for Tau Ceti, and a colony has been established down there (though you never actually go to it). The Marathon has three AIs on board, and the one you'll become most intimately familiar with is Durandal. AIs can develop into a state called Rampancy, in which they essentially go insane. Durandal is obsessed with first gaining his freedom and then, in the later games, in his quest for immortality and escaping the end of the universe, billions of years from now. He uses the player as a tool against the Pfhor, eventually stealing their scoutship at the end of the first game and teleporting the player onboard with him.

In what other game can you play as the destructive, vengeful right hand of an insane computer?

Durandal frequently teleports the player into the worst of the fighting, or into areas where the more human crew of his ship would not survive, often with a cavalier attitude that boils down to "Oh, you'll be fine." The plot doesn't need to go beyond this, providing the perfect excuse for you to simply kill tons of enemies, but it does - oh so much farther. There are schemes in the first game, rivalries between the AIs, and a bit of a surprise twist of how the Pfhor found the Marathon in the first place, and why Durandal has entered Rampancy.

In the second game you're on the homeworld of the S'pht, a cybernetic race enslaved by the Pfhor, sifting through their old computer terminals to learn about their history, in an effort to free them and to find a piece of technology that Durandal desperately wants. You also get tidbits of backstory about other races that inhabit the galaxy, such as the Nar, who sprang into existence shortly after the universe did, and use delightfully archaic means to get things done - such as tugging on a planet with a massive chain attached to a spaceship to change its orbit. Cool things that you never actually see in the game because they were at the time far beyond its ability to replicate are given to you in terminals, in text, and your imagination (remember what that is?) is left to give them life. In so many games nowadays, if the engine can't create something, it just doesn't exist. There is no world outside the game levels.

So what of Halo, every frat boy's favorite game series? I usually dismiss Halo, partly because Bungie sold out to Microsoft and abandoned their computer-based loyalists, and partly because halo is really nothing that special. There are some recognizable Bungie touches to it, such as persistent corpses that go flying with explosions (back when this wasn't the norm), but overall it's just a run-of-the-mill shooter. So why am I even mentioning it here?

There are some parallels between Marathon and Halo, and I'm convinced that they take place in the same universe, though the two are definitely separate and one doesn't impact on the other at all. There's a blank gap in Marathon's timeline of about a century or so, when the Marathon is en route to Tau Ceti, and the dates quite neatly line up with the time period in which Halo takes place. The ship had ten Mjolnir Mark IV cyborgs onboard, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halo's Spartans are Mjolnir Mark V cyborgs. Cortana is an AI, though obviously much more graphical, and the names Cortana and Durandal are related, if you bother to look it up. I think it's interesting to think that the galaxy is large enough for these two timelines to take place simultaneously, that when the Marathon reaches Tau Ceti, the technology onboard is actually outdated. The idea that Halo and Marathon share a common universe has also prompted some great non-canon fan works, such as the Enkidu terminals, which were at first thought to be genuine teasers from Bungie.

But in the end, Halo doesn't share the same sense of storytelling that Marathon does. There's a secret sort of reward in Halo 3 I hear, some text-based computer terminals that strike me as being a sort of nod to its roots. For the most part though, it's got nothing to distinguish it in the same way that Marathon told a story of being manipulated by an insane computer who was obsessed with his own survival and godhood at a time when all other games had you running around trying to find the red key.