UESC
The UESC are referred to in the original game (Marathon 1994).
Reference to the UESC first appears the Marathon manual (page 2). The manual provides a description of Marcus Tiberius Buendia, president of the Unified Earth Space Council (UESC), giving an address prior to the launch of the UESC Marathon. ref
Here is the relevant text.
With apprehension, the same apprehension you felt three hundred and twenty-two years earlier, you envision Marcus Tiberius Buendia, one of Sol's greatest leaders. "Mankind will venture out past its earthly bounds, and move into a future grander and more real than the total of its own written history." Buendia, the president of the Unified Earth Space Council, had spoken those words to the people of the Sol System on the eve of the launching of the Marathon. "This, the grandest achievement mankind has ever conceived will be for the purpose of peace and the preservation of the human race. May this great technological ark carry with it the sum total of all human wisdom, and may neither time nor distance weaken our common ties."
This UESC pre-launch event is corroborated by the in-game logs of Bernard Strauss. ref
Here is the relevant text.
The following is from the logs of Bernard Strauss, the Marathon's first science director:
***
November 15, 2209. <2209.11.15.19.34>
Thank heaven, the ceremony is over. The UESC president came aboard Marathon and gave a speech. Short, but to the point. He was surrounded by his 'bodyguards'. How ironic. "This, the grandest technological achievement of all of mankind..."
Had he only known that it carried also all of the destructive knowledge of mankind. Ten cyborgs.
I'll be glad to be put in stasis for the next three hundred years. Marathon was the only good idea that the UESC has had in a long time.
The year 2209 was later corrected by Bungie to 2472 after the game was released in order to correct chronological inconsistencies in the Marathon timeline. ref
The spelling of 'Bernard Strauss' also varies in the original game. ref
The in-game text also refers to the UEG (United Earth Government). ref
This sometimes causes confusion when people mix up Unified and United and call the UESC the United Earth Space Council.
Further confusion arises when terms such as UESG and USEC are introduced in the later games of the trilogy. ref
In the Marathon ARG (Alternate Reality Game) the UESC had a website at uesc.io. It is gone now. This is how the opening page originally looked when the site became active.
If you tried to access the UESC website on your mobile device you get this. (Hint hint folks... Bungie say... get a desktop terminal to read Marathon stuff.)
The USEC website was originally found by sending an email to an address found on the bottom right corner of the Traxus Global page.
Sending an email to this address returned the following automatic reply:
Obviously the right password or correct phrase was required.
In an effort to overcome this problem Dwarf on the Game Detectives Discord sent the whole Traxus webpage text to the email address and got back the following reply.
The brute force method gets the job done.
There are number of words that would have triggered the correct response from Vulcan. The one on the Traxus webpage text was either 'titan' or 'axion' part of the word 'traxionic'. The one that Bungie might have expected at this stage in the ARG was 'axion' from a redundant piece of code in the marathonthegame.com source.
When the UESC website was initially found it displayed the following failure to connect message. Shortly after the Marathon ARG ended it reverted back to this state.
