Oct 3, 2005 (Monday)

Worth noting this post on the Story forum from David Candland (aka Evil Otto) of Bungie Studios:

Re: 10 years of Madness!!!
Posted By: Evil Otto <davidc@bungie.com>
Date: 9/21/05 2:25 p.m.

In Response To: Re: 10 years of Madness!!! (Hamish Sinclair)

: Already started with the glass raising. Ten years... what a hoot.

Hats off to the most meticulous, zealous and long-lived fan site in the gaming community. We at Bungie never cease to be amazed by the theories concocted, truths discovered and subconscious probed on this site. Congrats on your tireless search for tru7h.

Also on the Story forum:

IMG's article on Marathon... with a few errors!
What makes a good puzzle?
What makes a nice map?
Japanese Marathon shirt
Search the Story page... if you have a few years to spare!

Sept 19, 2005 (Monday)

Created Sept 19, 1995
Last updated Sept 19, 2005

Yes folks the Marathon's Story page is ten years old today. Still updated... not as regularly over the last few years... but still here. If you want to see what the Story page looked like exactly ten years ago then click here.

Thanks to Claude Errera for taking some pics of his newly acquired Marathon keychain. Claude bought his off eBay recently for the princely sum of $82. According to Claude the seller was Jim Ruiz, former Bungie employee and runner of the old Bungie Store prior to the move to Microsoft.

top view
side view

More info about the rare Marathon keychain and how it might just save your life can be found in the Blasts from the Past section.

Sept 12, 2005 (Monday)

Greg Kirkpatrick is alive and well and living... somewhere...

Thanks to Bob-B-Q <pwrofs7n@verizon.net> in this Story forum post for spotting a rare sighting of Greg Kirkpatrick in a gaming magazine called The Escapist. Greg, the main author of the Marathon story, wrote a letter to the editor in response to an article on Marathon by Pat Miller, in an earlier edition of the magazine. Those of you with old browsers (myself included) may have difficulty viewing the webpage so I've taken the liberty of reprinting Greg's letter here.

To the editor: As one of the people involved with making all those cryptic story messages and all that.. I can only say that you stated almost exactly in your article what our intentions were when we created the games - that is a game that had a story and that we liked to play.

At the time, we told the story via terminals because we simply didn't have the resources (computer or manpower) to do anything else. I think the success of the terminals was due simply to it's incredible limitations. We were forced to tell a story in sets of 3 paragraphs..

all the other crazy stuff came from that. Nowadays, games can do anything that can be done in a full length film. Would anyone still read a terminal in a game if it was there?

I enjoyed the article, it certainly brought me back - as for the link between halo and marathon, I can only say that anything more than a causal link would have been rather difficult since there were only a few people on earth who knew the story well enough to keep the tie- ins accurate. Hamish, myself, and maybe a few other people - none of whom worked at Bungie by the time even Myth was in production.

-gk

The article on Marathon by Pat Miller in issue 7 of the The Excapist is definitely worth reading. Here's a piece:

Perhaps the most impressive display of Marathon dedication resides in the group of people surrounding the Marathon's Story web site. Maintained by webmaster Hamish Sinclair, the site catalogs each terminal screen of plot exposition present in the Marathon trilogy, plus years of communal discussion and investigation. This plot discussion is no teenage "ZOMG AERIS IS ALIVE" fluff; Marathon's story uses computer terminal gibberish, numerology, Shakespeare, the Bible, ancient mythology, and complex mathematics all within the context of its own rich backstory, and so it takes people literate in each subject to decipher each message. Many games might have a secret message, a developer's room, maybe a hidden level or two; not so many games will present the raw hexadecimal code of a secret level file in the game's own narrative text, and not so many communities have the raw ingenuity and talent necessary to spot it. For years, people tore apart and analyzed everything they could - the hex code of the data files, hidden messages in the manuals, even the bar codes on the game boxes - and found clues and easter eggs that helped them piece the story together bit-by-bit. To the fans, Bungie had made a literary masterpiece, and they were determined to appreciate it, Quake and Unreal be damned.

The following is the blurb about The Escapist:

The Escapist covers gaming and gamer culture with a progressive editorial style, with articles and columns by the top writers in and outside of the industry. A weekly publication, its magazine-style updates offer content for a mature audience of gamers, entertainment enthusiasts, industry insiders, and other "NetSet" readers.

Check out this post on the Story forum from Enkidu <enkidu@bungie.org> about more Bungie references in The Escapist magazine

You can also pick up a rare shrinkwrapped copy of Marathon on eBay courtesy of Yossarian. He is also selling his Mac Action Sack, including the actual sack and all the original contents.

Sept 2, 2005 (Friday)

Marathon Key Chain for Sale, Cheap.

As fate would have it a rare opportunity occurred on eBay to buy a Marathon Key Chain... and most folks missed it! The Story forum only got word of this late in the day. Bidding ended at Sep-01-05 23:42:12 PDT. The keychain goes to a good home however. Claude (mr.bungie.org) Errera placed the highest bid of $82. Cheap at the price! Well actually it would have set you back $5.50 in 1995 and if you spent over $75 at the Bungie store you got one free! For more details about the Marathon Key Chain (... life, the Universe and everything) check out the Blasts from the Past section.

Sept 1, 2005 (Thursday)

Marathon Scenario News gets an update about Infested by Alexander Smith.

There's a small update on the Pathways Into Darkness page as well.

On the Story forum the subject of Marathon in different languages appears again. But just how many languages was it translated into? There have been reports of Spanish, Japanese, and German. Do you know more?