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Marathon's Story Page
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Christmas Art from General-RADIX on the Story forum.
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Merry Christmas to all Story page readers... everywhere!
And to get you into that festive Marathon spirit here are some cool yule tidings from
ghosts of Christmas past:
President People's The Twelve Days of CRISTmas Version 2 .Have a good one. :)Ben Wigler's Jingle Bells.
poena.dare's The White Christmas Term.
And last but not least the perennial Battle Cat's
Christmas Aboard the Marathon
and
The 12 Days of Marathon Christmas.
Courtesy of The Wayback Machine
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Happy 25th Birthday... Marathon.
Marathon shipped on 21 December 1994, 25 years ago today.
Some folks had the game just in time for Christmas.
Total Carnage ensued and the rest they say is... history.
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Thanks for the memories.On the Story forum there is a very nice write up by Yossarian on 25 years of Marathon under the title Durability. Definitely worth a read.
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Thanks to Lion O Cyborg <carrmichaelw@googlemail.com> in a Story forum post for pointing out that there is a YouTube compilation video of all the BOB sounds in Marathon 2. There is also a similar compilation video for all the VacBOB sounds in Marathon Infinity.Worth a listen if you are feeling nostalgic at this time of year.
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Nice to see Bungie celebrate 25 years of Marathon with a 25th Anniversary t-shirt. Grab one today in the Bungie Store.
As if we didn't... remember... like an old dream.
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Thanks to General-RADIX <radixgonzo@gmail.com> in a Story forum post for pointing out that there is a Marathon shirt amongst Bungie's Black Friday 2019 offerings. Based on the shirt image it is clearly Marathon-related and apart from the use of the Marathon symbol and other Marathon-related images it has the name Marathon on the sleeve. The question of course is why? Why after all these years has Bungie decided to release a piece of merchandise based on their 90s game?
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Baran (aka zlatanbaranovic on Reddit) writes in to say that he got Greg Kirkpatrick to answer a number of questions via email in addition to those on his Reddit page. You can read them here.Here's a sample:
Question from Baran:
For Marathon 1, you're credited as a writer alongside Jason Jones. How much of the game's story is your take, and how much is his?Answer from Greg:
The background and setting were done by me. Some of the ongoing development was done by everyone with feedback from Reginald. The S'pht for example were created and designed by him before we had them into the story. Jason wrote some of the terminals.
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Greg Kirkpatrick continues to answer Marathon questions on Reddit. Here are few more tidbits:
Question from nevets01:
Do the sevens mean something, or just another effort to "subvert the mind"? (Or is it just amplified noise combined with the human urge to use 7 as a 'random' number?)Answer from Greg:
It's obviously a number that has a lot of human mysticism surrounding it. If you made a murder-crimescene corkboard of Marathon, and I know some of you guys probably have, you'd find sevens all over the place. I think yes, mostly the answer to your question is yes. There was such an intention to try and get into the head of the player to try and keep everything connected.In parts of the backstory that I barely remember and I don't think were written down, there were pieces that connected that helped make some of these ambiguous elements make sense. But mostly it was a way to help determine when and where to insert them, with the intention never being to just come out and say "7 really means 11!" :)
and
Question from nevets01:
Also, what is the S'Pht language? is the text on the side of the S'Pht terminals just gibberish, or is there some meaning there? If I remember correctly, there are 26 glyphs on the S'Pht logon symbol, which repeat after the 26th, implying a mapping from the English alphabet.Answer from Greg:
The actual script for S'pht is a font that Reggie found somewhere, IRC. I honestly, don't remember if we hid any messages in there or not.
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Thanks to Blake37 <makuch.alex@gmail.com> in a Story forum post for pointing out that Greg Kirkpatrick (under the username greg_throwaway) is answering questions on Reddit about Marathon and other things. This was made possible by zlatanbaranovic on Reddit.Here's a taster:
Question from TOASTEngineer:
What fraction of the speculation on the Facts and Puzzling Things About page and in the community in general is stuff they actually put in intentionally, and how much of it is just amplifying noise until you get something?Answer from Greg:
I'll say this - there was an intention to everything (sans a few typos) in the terminals. There was an active attempt to subvert the mind of the player by the game. Some of the more puzzling terminals were put there to try and do something. I can't tell you what that was (as there were various reasons), but often it would be done for pacing.so if there were 3 Leela terminals in a row that the player would find, we'd try to switch it up. We had all these events going on that the player didn't know about at the time or would find out about later, so we had things we could pull in to break up things a bit.
the whole thing was done to try and keep it interesting and, yes, mysterious and ambiguous. It's such a cop-out of storytelling, but hey, I was 23 and I'd never done anything on a game before. :)
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To celebrate Bungie Day, Shining Raven <shining.raven@live.com> has updated her S'pht Clan attributions. To jog your memory here is what she said back in the 2018 about the subject:
I've noticed many of the S'pht terms from M2 logon with a mash of text that contains a S'pht clan name. Many contain "Mnr," but there are others, for example "Rr2Shr9<995.52.194.63>" may be written by the S'pht'Shr, and "dizzy.frow.5.63.Nma.23.1" may be written by the S'pht'Nma. Here is a list of what events may be attributed to the different clans, based on these logons/logoffs as well as what's written in the terminals themselves.Here are the 11 S'pht clans:
S'pht'Lhar
S'pht'Hra
S'pht'Nma
S'pht'Kah
S'pht'Vir
S'pht'Yra
S'pht'Val
S'pht'Shr
S'pht'Mnr
S'pht'Yor
S'pht'Kr
Which clan was destroyed, captured, tortured, dissected, irradiated, killed each other, released the S'ct'lac'tr. Fun read for Bungie Day. :)
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Happy Bungie Day.Some artwork from General-RADIX on the Story forum to celebrate the day.
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Thanks to RE7 <jrfield22@gmail.com> for pointing out in a Story Forum post that the K'lia reference in Destiny 2 had in fact been discussed back in May of this year. Sorry to the original poster Saint for not picking this up earlier. Couldn't help smiling at this comment from Bob-B-Q in the discussion.
"A scrap long dead, crafted from lore your writers did not understand."Nice one.
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Jonathan Lester <jon.dealspwn@gmail.com> sends in an interesting Marathon reference in Bungie's Destiny 2. He writes:
As a big fan of Bungie story I've been obsessively hunting the in-game lore books in Destiny 2 - and came across another tasty Marathon connection.https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/thetis-brave#book-truth-to-power
For context, our character is being contacted by Medusa, a corrupted ancient computer (or an alien God's stolen computer pretending to be Medusa... or the alien god pretending to be... it's a bit complicated).
"Another failed timeline. I'm glad you're okay.".. "The Dreaming City was built in imitation of a greater world, a wonder lost to the Awoken but not forgotten. Like wandering K'lia, which I on&_>>> called/summoned home."
K'lia? Failed timelines? Perhaps Medusa is Thoth and Destiny is simply another Infinity failed timeline and we're just waiting for the next Electric Sheep level...
Even if Destiny lore makes no sense to you Marathoner's will not fail to recognise the overt reference to "wandering K'lia" and being "called/summoned home". If you remember K'lia was one of the moon's of Lh'owon which folded out of orbt taking the S'pht'Kr clan with it. Only to return 1000 years later after we activate Thoth who then proceeds to summon the S'pht'Kr back to Lh'owon.
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RADIX <adixgonzo@gmail.com> came across an interesting find on the Wayback Machine (digital archive), namely Jonas Eneroth's homepage on Bungie's web page dating from 1997. Back in the day Bungie employees could add their own homepage to the corporate site. Folks like Alex, Matt, Rob all had one. As did Jonas Eneroth.For those of you who remember... Jonas worked for Bungie on Marathon 2, Marathon 2 Win95 and numerous other projects.
Radix writes:
I'dunno about you, but that first image on the "rant" page looks an awful lot like a 3D model of Durandal's M1 avatar..Radix is referring to this image.
Is this a 3D rendering of Durandal's 2D image?
Could this be a long lost Marathon 3 asset?
Marathon 3? What was it? What was the storyline? How do I get the beta?
Back in Mar 29, 1998 Steve Wood sent in some interesting information about Bungie's aborted Marathon 3 project. It is part of an interview with Jason Jones in the Official Myth Strategy Guide.
Bart: So, where did the idea of Myth come from?Jason Jones: Well, it's really not all that glamorous. I could probably lie and make up something cool, but I'll tell you the truth instead. We started out doing the natural extension of Marathon, which would have turned out to be something along the lines of Quake. At that time, the first screenshots of Quake were already out, and we sort of knew where they were going, and everybody else did too. We were going to try and do one of those sorts of games, and after about two months of working on it, nobody was really into it at all, and I just had the feeling like we weren't going to be able to pull it off in time. The whole time we were working on the Quake-like game, we had been talking about this other game that nobody thought would work out, and we'd been calling it "The Giant Bloody War Game." We'd sit around talking about the Quake-like game, trying to be serious and make some serious decisions about it, and everyone just kept talking about "The Giant Bloody War Game," laughing, having fun, etc. After about two months of that going on, I just showed up at the office one day with the map editor in its most basic form, It could just adjust the heights and stuff and import the color map, and in one day we switched our project from a shooter game that would have had us chasing our competition's tail to what has basically become Myth."
This was supported by a post by Matt Soell (Bungie Software) on the Marathon Central Discussion Forums (now long gone) around the same time. Matt wrote:
There was, at one time, a Marathon 3 project. It was intended to be a complete rewrite of the Marathon engine with all the goodies people have come to expect (fully 3D, snazzy special effects, much nicer networking, etc.). It was canned because none of our principal development team were very interested in finishing it - or at least, they were more interested in doing something new. Hence, Myth: The Fallen Lords.
And now for something completely different...Bruce Morrison <bruce@manuptimestudios.com> sent in the following link to a report about a new line of personal care products called XBox Lnyx. So what I hear you say? Well Bruce points to the infamous Lynx Phoenix Ad... from 19 years ago... that used Bungie's custom Halo font. As Thoth would say... (circumstances are cyclical) .
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On the Story forum W'rkncacnter announces Aleph One: Pathways Into Darkness.
Yes you heard right... PID running on the latest beta version of Aleph One. So now you can play it on a PC.
Check out these YouTube videos for actually game play. Looking good.
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You sometimes get sent the strangest things...While not specifically Marathon-related Enzo Martella <enzomartella2003@outlook.com>
sent in this link to a YouTube video of Destiny 1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsaqHW6cEnY
The 'seven above and the rest below' reference is of course from Pathways Into Darkness.
Someone on the Destiny team had a sense of humour. :)
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Just watched an old episode of Star Trek (The Original Series) from 1967. Entitled "This Side of
Paradise", the Enterprise visits the Federation colony on Omicron Ceti III believing that all the
colonists are dead. However they are all healthy but infected by spore planets. All the male
colonists wear green jumpsuits. When Spock is 'assimilated' by the spore plants he too starts
wearing a green jumpsuit.
Green jumpsuit colonists... They're Everywhere!
Go to What's New for Jan - Dec 2018
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Last updated Dec 24, 2019
