Filename:	sphtkr.jpg
Size:	811 x 480 pixels
Date:	November 1995 (Marathon 2: Durandal)
About:	S'pht'Kr. Chapter ⅠX in Marathon 2: Durandal. One of ten illustrations Craig did for the game. In the game this Chapter screen slowly scrolls to the right revealing the full image and the title of the Chapter. In a nod to the original game the sound that plays when this Chapter screen is displayed is the opening sound you hear when you start Marathon. Depicted in the image is a Defender, the S'pht'Kr Elite Guard Powered Armor. They make their appearance close to the end of the game when the lost eleventh clan make their dramatic appearance. Rob McLees created the S'pht'Kr Defender. In an 1996 interview with Strata Inc. Rob explains how they were created. "StudioPro was used for a number of key shapes in Marathon 2: Durandal. In a game that involves combating lots of aliens with a variety of weapons, all of the weapons, some of the larger decorative objects, and three alien types (the Probe, Juggernaut and Defender) were all rendered with StudioPro. The Defender only appears near the end of the game, but as the fabled lost clan of the S'pht race, they play a major role in the plot. The process of building the Defender began with a somewhat older graphic technology, paper and pencil. With conceptual drawings at hand, I ran StudioPro and formed the alien's body out of basic shapes (cones, spheres), similar to modeling with clay. I rotated the rough shape and smoothed out the glitches. Looking at it from a variety of angles also helped me decide what textures to wrap it with. The next step was importing a color map, and importing textures I had already made into the bump map. A few experiments led to a bump pattern that gave the Defender the desired look of sophisticated, but ancient, technology. StudioPro's raytracing feature allowed us to try out various lighting effects from the different positions the alien would take in the game. The Defender is an asymmetrical creature, so every action it performs (shooting, raising shields, crashing) needs to be rendered separately from every angle-about 40 renderings total. For this, I set up a batch render, turned it on and went home. In the morning, the rendered images got a final touch-up, were dropped into the game's Shapes file, and then I moved on to the next project!"

Filename:	Mullins 12.pic
Size:	832 x 624 pixels
Date:	May 1997 (Marathon Trilogy Box Set)
About:	One of sixteen Marathon Desktop Pictures on the Marathon Trilogy CD. Note this a cropped and transposed version of the Chapter screen but larger. Craig has never posted the original S'pht'Kr image on his own web page so it is not clear what it looked like. It is possible that the original version is not what you see in the Chapter screen but the one in the Marathon Desktop Picture above. This is similar to what happened to the Volunteers Chapter screen. Bungie transposed the Volunteers image for the game but used the original version as a Marathon Desktop Picture. Transposing the S'pht'Kr image for the game provides for a more dramatic reveal of the S'pht'Kr Defender as it slowly scrolls across the screen.

Filename:	spht_kr.lg.jpg
Size:	811 x 480 pixels
Date:	January 2002 (bungie.org)
About:	Same as the S'pht'Kr Chapter screen above but without the writing.