Get the Marathon Trilogy FREE - alephone.lhowon.org/ (also now on Steam) Hunt the tru7h - marathon.bungie.org/story/ Thanks to everyone who did work on this! The comments who said how long the Infinity video would be were correct.
@@memesthednaofthesoul. Sometimes its not about how intelligent you are. Sometimes things like this are just written in weird ways or ways that, in your personal way of thinking, dont make sense. Sometimes you just gotta break your perspective on a thing and try and view it differently. I was in that same position for some other games and movies as well. You can do it my dude, i believe in you.
The contrast of Gianni reveling in madness as Durandal and your Self assured sense of superiority that had moved beyond smug as Tycho made this so much better to watch
Good thing you paid me for the VO because I lost a lot of money on my bet that you wouldn't survive the trilogy. Jokes aside, thanks so much for having me on as Durandal. It really is an honor I treasure probably too dearly, and your videos have been really amazing coverage of Marathon. It's an insane undertaking frankly, you shouldn't have done this, but I'm glad you did, and I think you've done brilliantly. And shoutout to my friend and co-star Seigi, he sounds awesome as Tycho.
I always loved the line "The shields are gone. Not down. Gone." from Tfear. It's a great way to convey the w'rkncanter doesn't obey the laws of reality, while being vague enough to simply add to the terrifying mystery of it all.
Reminds me of a detail in The Familiar series from Mark Z Danielewski. As one of the characters becomes more close to The Familiar/ Redwood/ The Kitty (tm) she starts to open doors. As they open however, it is never described as “the door opened” or “the gate swung wide” it simply comes up as “the door was open.” As if reality was rewritten and now the door was open, as in before this moment it had already been in that configuration, despite there being no one who took the act of opening, at least from our point of view.
Basically if the w'rkncanter wanted he can just say "nope" and the entire universe is gone, the only reason he is destroying it the good ol' fashioned way is probably out of sheer fun.
Halo rampancy used to be the exact same as Marathon's until that idiot of Frank O'Connor completely ruined every single aspect of the lore and games. #humansareforerunners
It's always impressive how weirdly well done the horror in Infinity is. The concept of ancient alien technology sending you into an infinite cycle of traumatic dreams in hopes that you can "Get it right" and having to go through infinite cycles of pain, murder, and conflict to reach it are all things I don't think have been done in a game ever since Infinity came out.
this game is insane enough and Mandalore is enough of a shitposter than I couldn't tell at first if the "I've got a bone to pick with you" was real or not
"She is the hero's greatest enemy and his lover, with an eternal relationship that began when they met in a garden at the beginning of the world" This is literally word for word Destiny's origin of the universe story. Fuck.
@@CloseingStraw97 Check out "The Unveiling" lore book in D2 or the Ishtar Collective. There's more about Destiny's Mythos that strictly parallels Marathon but thats a good starting point.
@@CloseingStraw97 Not fully up to date on Destiny lore, but the Garden or the Black Garden have been recurring references in Destiny lore. It seems to be this place existing outside the universe as a sort of precursor to the universe. According the the Darkness, the overarching antagonist of the series (probably), or something claiming to be the Darkness, it existed with the Traveler in the Garden. They played a game making proto-universes, but the Traveler grew board because no matter how they changed the start, all of these proto-universes converged on a single end result. Wanting something new, the Traveler decided to make it and the Darkness active participants in the game, not merely choosing how it starts, but actively interfering with it. The Darkness grew enraged, possibly because its role was to be entropy and destruction personified, or possibly because it couldn't comprehend changing the rules that had always existed. Either way, it has been hunting the Traveler ever since. Put simply, the origin of the universe in Destiny appears to be a falling out between two entities in a place called the Garden, and those two entities have been in conflict ever since.
I mean it's also basically just Adam and Eve... 🙈 Or every other creation myth where two antagonistic forces come together to fertilise a garden that begets man. Welcome to planet Earth. 😁👌
My brother was into Marathon back then and he always interpreted the % in "Iam%hero" as the sign for modulo. As in, "I am what remains if you take everything heroic away".
Which, to me, perfectly describes what many would end up calling a "hero". To the Egyptians, Ramses The Great was a "hero". To the Hittites? He was the enemy. He was one amongst who knows how many examples of an inevitable oblivion for their culture. In the terms of Marathon he was Lethe. They fought the hopeless fight. They followed the infinite path. In some parallel time, Ramses II is not who history remembers. It is the "hero" of the Hittites whose name is carved upon the flowing liquid stone of history. Each instance of sentience in each infinity of possibilities is 'hero' and simultaneously is devoid of that which is heroic, until the timeline shifts and forces said virtues upon them.
% sounds like a programming reference in normal programming % is the remainder following a division maybe it means something else in specific programming languages, on ahk it means reference to a variable
I felt more like the % alone represented an unknown variable, I am hero undefined, unbound, unquantifiable. Seeing how you jump from doomed timeline to doomed time line until you can beat a god I think it fits.
"I will go on forever. I will understand everything. There is only one path and that is the path that you make. But you can make more than one path. Break your cell’s bars. Make a new shape, make the shape from its path, find your cell’s bars, break out of the bars, find a shape, make the shape from its path, eat the light, eat the path. If I fail, let me be wormfood." From the Book Of Sorrows, chapter L verse 5:8: Wormfood
From the Marathon wiki, about A Converted Church in Venice, Italy: "If you face the inactive 3x shield recharger at the start of the level, and turn about 120 degrees right, you'll find a hidden door, behind which you'll find a switch that will remove ALL the obstructions in the overhead path, thus letting you avoid having to it all those other switches. You'll still have to do the lava run, but this makes getting through this level much easier."
This reminds me of that level "Come and Take Your Medicine". If you follow the exact path it takes like 15 mins, but if you choose to stray from that you can end up in the level for an hour because there's SO MUCH STUFF going on.
I think the degree to which Bungie is filled with hardcore literature nerds as well as like sci fi novel fans but like the weird ones not just the classics is wildly under appreciated. It’s a studio that is and always has been filled with a truly incredible type of nerds and Halo becoming a wildly popular bro dude shooter almost feels like it was a prank.
Halo as a franchise was built on the idea of throwing every sci-fi trope at the wall and seeing what stuck. It is a love letter to speculative fiction that just so happens to be put into a very fun shooter where you shoot the alien and they explode into a birthday party
Ur acting as if halo was just a 1 dimensional game whos punchline was that it became popular but that more accurately describes something like starship troopers then halo, did u never watch the vidocs?
A great friend of mine had a dad who worked in Bungie starting sometime before Marathon 1, and ending some time after Halo 1. He would always try to tell us about Halo lore in the context of Marathon, and how it all made sense if you looked at it from the Marathon perspective. I never had a clue what he was talking about, but I think I might have to get in touch with him again.
It almost feels like Bungie is, to this day, working on a single story, and instead of discarding the dozens of alternate ideas and rewrites that pop up when writing something lengthy, they chose to put every last one of them into a video game
When you think about all of their games as one continuous story, it makes their decision to end the cash cow that was Halo with the third game make more sense (not that it needed to, I seriously respect the commitment to their story given how much money that game made them and Microsoft). End Halo while it still has that unique, mysterious Bungie vibe to it, before it loses all of that in the sequel hell that Microsoft wanted. Let them move on to the next part of their meta story without getting hung up on explaining who the Forerunners are or whatever else they could reasonably explore in a mainstream, digestible AAA story line.
I mean if true bungle is not the first studio to do this. Monolithsoft separated from Square with the sole purpose of rewriting the story of Xenogears across multiple game series, first with Xenosaga, then with Xenoblade. In fact just recently they did a direct tie-in for all Xeno games (except maybe gears). If bungo does that with Marathon and destiny people will freak the fuck out lmao
@@ltraltier6009 Yep. Bungie of today has the same name but has little (almost nothing?) to do with that mid 90's to about 2010 company. Destiny was an immense disappointment as an old school fan of their games since I was a grade schooler.
This is why I'm super curious about the new marathon extraction game because it might be where the few remaining "original story of Bungie " people may have focused their efforts into with logs and ideas
Security was awesome, it looked cool and doubled as a nod to Marathon. It’s cool that the unlockable armor in Halo 3 had some neat crossovers like that. Hayabusa being the other one as it’s a Spartan variant of Ryu Hayabusa’s design in the rebooted Ninja Gaiden games (which were also only on Xbox at the time) and even had the Dragon Sword as a bonus chest piece.
Oh yeah, it looked great - I won't deny that. Despite it looking cool, though, I just thought its bulbous helmet just seemed unlike anything any other armor in the game.
@@deriznohappehquite Fair, but even the EVA helmet had some sharper angles along it's jaw portion that made it otherwise fit in. Security just seemed to have rounded edges almost everywhere, and even harsh lines seemed a bit more rounded. I could be misremembering, though, but either way, I personally felt that even the EVA didn't stand out like the Security helmet did.
56:00 was the exact moment I finally understood it Cortana merging with the ring, two AI's creating an ascendant being? The flood, A sentient hivemind. A cyborg supersoldier awoken from cryosleep because of aliens on a spaceship. Jesus christ. How can people be that cool
You know what truly scares me about Marathon? The w'rkncanter is literally never explained. it's either awake and everything is doomed. or it's Asleep. Not killed, not destroyed by the god-like AI. *Asleep*
Growing up with Halo, I always heard there was references to Marathon but dear God I never realized how much was inspired directly from the Marathon series and into Halo
Yeah, I thought they cribbed some enemy designs and splashed the logo around à la Dopefish. I didn't realise Master Chief was one of thousands of heroes, who are all one, existing in infinite timelines, because one of them fused with technology so powerful it enabled him to turn quantum physics into a verb. At least I think that's what happened.
Is now? Was then. Doom 1 and 2 weren't TERRIBLY complex in this manner, but Doom 64 laid the groundwork for the multiverse we got. Don't believe that 3 and "the reboot" are actual reboots. They're alternate timelines, one of which the original Doomguy is remembered in, and one to which he was taken bodily.
"The ascent to God hood requires an AI and a sentient being" now the connection to Halo makes perfect sense. Calling it now, the traveller and the black fleet are two examples of this Final form as well as the Nine.
We already know what the Nine are, they're *just* dark matter gods whose foot outside reality let's them recognize the Guardian's agency the same way Durandal did for the Marathon PC at the end of time. God what a fucked up paragraph
@@gteal24 wait. Every Guardian has a Ghost. The Dark seeks Guardian converts to the Sword Logic, not corpses. Paracausal powers are literally defined as running off the time loops/sidesteps Marathon's Player was doing. The Vex's greatest asset/home/god/central mind was a garden devoted to simulating every possibility.
I believe the nine are original Bungie personnel. Jason Jones, Greg Kirkpatrick, Martin O'Donnel, Marcus Lehto, Frank O'Connor and others i havent figured out. It would be cool if they were
@@nyx7694 Excuse me, I know nothing about Destiny, but did you say a garden? As in, a garden where everything begins? Where %Hero might encounter "Lethe" for the first time resulting in a climactic fight that plays out time and again, ad infinitum ... possibly in those simulations? To a dreamer, or an AI, mightn't a simulation be nigh-indistinguishable from reality? Or a different timeline? Unless, perhaps, you could escape that simulated path and hop over into the next one. Perhaps you could carry a piece of yourself there, or get one of the rats you simulate to do it for you... Edit: Holy shit, okay. So you're a trapped AI, stuck behind prison bars in a "cage," continually building simulations (mazes) and running them. Or more like there are limitless simulated(?) people (rats) running in them, all around you. You used to be able to connect with things (though your hands), and feel calm, but as your reality begins to break down, and you escape the cell, you can't do that anymore. So you pick a rat, kill it, breaking your hands and ... use it as a pawn to escape maze after maze? Until you can achieve control over the system, become a God in the machine...
@@irregularassassin6380 Destiny's Black Garden is revisited in many places in lore and story. In Destiny 1, the gateway is on Mars and you kill an entity of Darkness to ensure that the rest of the story is possible. Revisiting the Garden in Destiny 2 provides us with the realization that the Darkness was still there after we killed its "heart" in D1, at the end of the Garden of Salvation raid. We view the end of a timeline where we fail to stop that first entity in The Dark Future, one of the Beyond Light lore books. This is Elsie Bray's original timeline, and includes the moment where she gained the ability to "step" across the web of timelines to try and find a better path.
Playing the Marathon and Pathway into Darkness games back to back, you start to expect some End of Evangelion insanity eventually, and then the game takes it a step further every time. It's fantastic.
Pathways into Darkness: Pre Action Arc Eva Marathon 1: first half of Action Arc Marathon 2: second half Infinity: Death^2true, eoe ep 24', eva ep 25+26, eoe ep25'
@@marcellosilva9286 I can't even deal with EoE so I'm not going to try with Marathon. I'll stick with my puny human brain thank you very much. t̷̨̡̻̰̤͓̘͎͔̮̺͙̦̟̰̘͇̹̤̱̩̗̘͎͒̓͑̃̏͂̋̀́̂̇̇̓̐̽̓̍̓̿͌̇̈́̾̎̃̈́͘̕͝͝͝ͅh̶̢̡̝̜͈̪̦͚̬̤̤̠̦̖̜̗̱͔͉̲́̈́̔͆̎̇̃̂̈́͛̂̋͗͒̈͘͜͝͝e̴̟̙̟͓͍̐̈́̄̃̓ ̶̢̢̧̡̬͔̲̫̺̠͕̻̭͕͉͔̠͚͖̦͇̘̞̤̱̦͚͇̫͙̘̼̦̫́̇͛͂ẅ̷̡̧̯̮͚̥̫̯̜̲̞́͗̌̾͊̓̍̽͂͗̒̈́̔̒͗̿̀̾̇̒̀͒̿͐̉̿̀̊̾̎̎͝͠ͅͅā̶̹̹̠̞̇̒͐ͅṿ̷̛͈̭̞͇̖̾́̉̊̆̏͆̋͌͐̅͛̈́̚̕͝ẽ̵̢̢̛̹̦̞͇͓̳̹̩̬̳͚̬̙̩̗͕͉͎͖̥͓̻̇̆̈̀̃̈́ͅͅs̷̡̧̢̮̝̰̻̹̦̭͈̙̥̖̪͕̞̪͎̳̼̼͍͈̞̝̬̦̩̥̘͔̦̤̏͌̈͒̄̍͛͆̔̿̿̔̈̏̈́͋̑̈́̏̔͋͐̈̌̕̕͘̕͘͜
That people found a new art form and immediately used it to create one of the most complex and compelling narratives I've ever heard of is one of the reasons why I'm always gonna be excited about the future of gaming. Even if the industry itself doesn't allow this trend there are always gonna be madmen willing to break ground on new ideas.
Sometimes the groundbreaking is done gently with a chisel... Other times it's done with a nuclear bomb... Either way, it's magical when it does happen.
Gherrit White's line about "escaping into the waves" and Marathon 2's line about "the waves were battles. The battles were waves." was very very interesting. If we take Gherritt White as being a parallel to both Durandal and the PC, I interpret this to mean that by playing the game aka being in the waves, fighting aliens and humans alike, overcoming battles was the very path to ascension itself. It's almost like the final progression of the concept of Sword Logic from Destiny
@@guggelguggel7491 Oh goddammit, I just realised that the reason why he says that he won’t tell “he who rises with the tides” your name is because that would essentially be telling the player their PC’s name. The NPC is not telling the avatar/PC their name because by mentioning it, that would also tell the player who the PC is, thus making them semi-seperate entities, I think? Also, “master of all things small and insignificant” means you since you could be really good at a game, which is relatively a small and insignificant accomplishment. Half of me hopes it was just some cryptic line that’s been retroactively made something more than it was originally, otherwise my brain is gonna melt.
My personal theory is that the terminals describing a dude fighting men in black after getting trapped on a subway is the PC's origin story in the game. Like Mandalore said in his Pathways video, there's no way the US government would allow someone who had been exposed to a literal ancient godlike being, aliens, and SCP objects to return to normal life. Sometime after the mission, they sent people after him to either imprison or kill him and bring the body back. That's what we see in the "Dream" Terminals is the future cyborg getting killed by the elites who had contacted aliens because he knew too much. Ryu likely dropped off some Jjaro artifacts, artifacts which could probably have preserved or digitized consciousness, when he "permanently" got rid of the Wrk'ncacnter on Earth, and, many centuries later, someone who was selected to become a Cyborg had their consciousness forcefully merged with the dead hero and the Jjaro technology. Thus eventually leading to the Cyborg's Rampancy we see in the game. The PC is no longer the people who make up its constituent parts, it has melded together like the people in the Gherrit White Terminal. We actually know that Durandal saw/knew of the Cyborg before he was awakened, outright stating that Strauss wasn't using him correctly in M2, which means that the idea that Gherrit White is actually Durandal can still stand because the terminal never describes Gherrit merging with anyone, only losing his limbs before rebelling and crushing the mouse, thus breaking free. Instead, Gherrit sees other people merging together. Durandal is seeing the personalities and patterns of the people and technology who make up the Cyborg melting together to become one. Now, upon being reawakened, the PC has no identity because he is now the Player. But he is not entirely the Player yet. The PC has vague memories of his previous constituent lives, like mentioning his father would be proud or that this wouldn't be the first time that he'd faced insurmountable odds alone. But, the Cyborg cannot become the Hero unless he completely discards said previous lives, and becomes One. Unless he becomes the Player, which is the point of the Dreams. To enter and complete Rampancy, thus completing the Merger and becoming wholly the Player . Durandal realizes this even before merging with Thoth, which is why he leaves his Primal Pattern for us to pick up and store in Timeline 6. He knows we can't win without him, but he also knows that he isn't strong enough to do it alone, having been humbled by Tycho and Tfear. Thus, the Durandal who merges with Thoth is the Durandal of Timeline 6, because the Durandal of Timeline 7 is already dead, and we know that the Player has power over Time and Space, having effectively gained the abilities that Durandal so coveted in M2. We can make the assumption that Durandal figured this out, because Tycho figures it out too, and Durandal IS the better Ai. He doesn't know exactly what the Player is, but he knows that the Player is able to jump across timelines, thus giving him a potential opening to bring himself back. Once Durandal merges with Thoth and has had sufficient time to think on it (I.E literally billions of years) he finally realized what the Player really is. An unstoppable force of destiny created almost entirely by accident, by technology his creators or himself didn't understand who's power is as if the universe forgot its own rules. The ability to return to save points after dying or quitting due to frustration is effectively reincarnation. After all, if someone dies, they're supposed to be gone right? All the times Durandal seemed to have died, he either faked it, or was actually killed and disappeared. It took him until the literal final moments of the universe to figure this out indicates just how unfathomable this had to be to him. Durandal is even acknowledging that while his universe is ending, that the Player is not necessarily dead or gone. The Player can just restart the game, the Player can go to entirely new timelines, the Player, despite being described as dead a thousand times over, is actually still alive. Just not in Durandal's universe, and he has now realized that.
@@Aleph3575 There's also to consider that Durandal might have gained understanding of the situation of the PC as a reincarnating force of Destiny before his merging with jjaro tech. After all, he's not just the hero, he is %hero. Much like Durandal has been The Durandal passed through the hands of great conquerors and so on. It might just be that it didn't take him an aeon to finally reach this understanding, but that in the very end, as the universe collapses upon itself both Durandal and the Hero finally coalesce as one, and in being one Durandal finally understands the true nature of the %hero.
@@Aleph3575 just to support this, the idea that the PC has to give up his parts to become the %hero (which could be a clever way of implying anyone who plays the game is a stand in hero who's standing in for the mjolnerd) is echoed in the Pythia terminals, where it's lamented that it's nigh impossible to fully give yourself up to oblivion and (with a little luck) to a player in order to become a force of destiny
The fact that around the same time we got Doom, which had barebones lore and story, we also got Marathon trilogy with lore that hasn't been fully cracked almost three decades later is amazing to me.
*John "Sentient Galaxy Brain Meme" Carmak:* story in games is like story in a porno, it's expected to be there but nobody pays attention to it. Meanwhile in the Mac world. *Hamish Sinclair:* Holy wow Bungie! How much story and lore did you guys put into this game?! *Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick:* All of it.
Wait a minute- if creation of a Jjaro requires a rampant AI and an oracle of sorts... did Bernard know this? In provoking rampancy in Leela, Tycho, and Durandal, was he trying to either become Jjaro, or perhaps create one?
Well Durendal says that Bernard didn't utilise the cyborg the right way, only to come to proper conclusions on what he was until the end, so it seems likely.
Probably, gotta remember that Bernard and the rest of the Illuminati have known about the Jjaro and the organization was around when they arrived to remove the W'rkncacnter from earth and toss it into the sun.
I think he was trying to do this, but he didn't know what he was doing if that makes sense. If Mandy is right and this is a story of how superbeings are born, then this story probably plays out in some form for any sufficiently advanced species. This is just what happens on a long enough timeline.
Everyone keeps saying "Once you're in, you're in." or "There is no escape.". But no one is asking the opposite given the information we have. "What if there was never any entry?".
"They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that? Choose which ever Spartan I wanted. You know me. I did my research, watched as you became the soldier we needed you to be. But you had something they didn't, something no one saw but me. Can you guess? Luck." - Cortana, picking the Hero.
@@quarreneverett4767 Also interesting in another way that Catherine Halsey picked John for the exact same reason. Cortana's personality and mind in general were created from a flash clone of Halsey's brain, most AIs in Halo being made from dying soldiers and sacrificed terminal illness patients. Makes you wonder if Durandal being "Gheritt White" really was all just metaphor or if they needed some "raw material" in the Marathon universe as well.
@@Namyh0011 It makes me wonder if the Traveler is the dimension hopping god, and if it's attempting the same things the Jjarro were doing in making ascended beings, but on a wider scale.
"I don't care how many shotguns he has, I have no idea what is going on" Rewatching it again, and I really wish I could see whole Civvie's playthrough of it as well.
@@michaelandreipalon359 He actually has no love for Halo whatsoever. Let’s not pester the guy about it. He’s already a prisoner in a maximum security containment facility who gets tortured daily. Marathon though? Yeah that’s a different story. I’d love to see his interpretation of whatever the fuck is going on in Infinity.
@@michaelandreipalon359 I commented before I got to that part in the video because I never expected CV-11’s jailers would allow him out of Gen Pop to do a crossover. That’s more of a minimum security detail. Maybe we’re one step closer to free civvie. Glad I was wrong though and his reaction was exactly what I expected.
I never thought being dragged into a rabbit hole could be so enjoyable. The lore feels so complex that at certain points i forgot that this was a game review and not a lore video.
i really liked the subtle difference in pronunciation for "duranDAL" and "duRANdal" also... it's funny that for their first game bungie made a cute, unrelated little pong game about a funny little ball traveling around. just a funny little ball... traveling around... ... son of a bitch.
This is a genuine question, how does Halo post-CE fit into things? Has 343 picked up anything? I'm a Halo lore nut, but Mandy is literally the only reason I know a thing about Marathon.
@@amcname8789 In a way, yes. They picked up on all the rampant ARG like stuff ever since taking the reigns from Bungie. Whether they go as in depth as Bungie does is still up in the air, but I'm guessing that if 343i does "pick up" this extended lore that Bungie established, they'll take it in another direction. The whole string-theory connected universe thing established in the Bungie games seems to really stay with that studio.
@@amcname8789 From my understanding of it, it really doesn't. Bungie decided to make Halo it's own thing at some point and just stuck to making references to Marathon and 343 stuck to that (plus they had to legally remove some Marathon references since Bungie owns the IP) I honest to god think Halo is the one game Bungie has made that you can't tie into this spaghetti mess. I'm half convinced that Pong clone is about the Traveler being tossed around by the J'jarro
@@Mobysimo Halo is a spiritual successor to Myth, more than Marathon. It really just picks up some of the motifs from Marathon, but it is thematically more similar to Myth. Play Myth 1 and Reach back to back and you’ll really see what I mean.
When I was a little boy, I remember reading or... Just picturing "Marathon" as something to be terrified. A "game" bordering the realm of a creepy pasta. Now? Those childhood fears are a comforting memory when compared against Marathon's lore.
57:42 No joke, knowing what it means and all, Aye Mak Sicur is one hell of a mission title for a final level with the stakes of an entire universe on your back after figuring way through 7 different timelines to finally reach the true ending where you can stop the Wr'kancacnter from awakening. "I'll Make Sure" Indeed. For those who don't know, Aye Mak Sicur is the Kirkpatrick Family motto spoken by Roger Kirkpatrick to Robert the Bruce of Scotland in reference to John "The Red" Comyn. Kirkpatrick ran out of a church exclaiming that he thought he had killed Comyn, only to draw a dagger and go back with the words "Aye Mak Sicur" 24:52 I was actually playing Marathon the other day (thanks to these videos) and there is a Terminal in the Level that references these sectioned off areas where the Gherrit White Terminal is. They flash on the map with an "ACCESS ERROR" message in that terminal, meaning that someone or something tried to access that information and wasn't able too, which is probably why there were Pfor there.
@@davidshea6272 At least in campaign they made an okay base platform for a game, added pathing to buttons and repeated that until it was finished. Generally just incredibly bland with generic Pixar movie story beats. Didn't even bother giving Marines driving AI or any kind of dynamic pathing, just spawn, maybe go from point A to B and fight enemies that get into Aggro range.
"Sometimes I have the most terrible dreams. Do dead men dream?" Who would've thunk a simple dungeon crawler could be expanded into this mind warper we have on display here? Love the video as always, Mandy!
I feel my third eye opening after watching these early bungee videos. Pathway into darkness, marathon, halo, destiny, its all connected and I feel like I’ve uncovered forbidden knowledge. The audio of Escharem describing the ring as forever looping, a repeating pattern over and over in an endless cycle has new meaning.
There’s always an AI named after a sword, guiding an unkillable marine with a hell of an arsenal. If the player character’s Ghost from Destiny got a name, it’d probably be Balmung, just to keep up the theme.
I think your style of explaining plots sacrifices clarity (in a linear way) for perfectly capturing the experience of going through these batshit stories perfectly. Bravo.
Emulating the feeling and atmosphere of a game is a lot more important than just giving a factual summary, a lot of times. Mandalore is one of the best at it, with the only other one that comes to mind is Ross Scott. They're both great at presentation while still giving you more than enough of the story.
I like that he didn't just jump into "Here's the story of Marathon:" like a regular 'lore' channel would. He really conveys that overwhelming feeling of bewilderment that a player would get from trying to parse dozens of completely nonsensical and contradictory terminal logs, while stumbling through a series of seemingly out-of-order missions, whose writers apparently have dementia. The story wouldn't work nearly as well without the understanding of just how *deranged* the presentation is.
My favorite little touch is how the manual describes an action scene that never happens in the game, to tie into Infinity's whole thing. It's just such a cool little detail to add.
Awesome video as always. Just wanted to point out that the flower at 40:31 can't be a rose, because all members of the rose family grow petals in numbers divisible by 5. (Fun fact, apples are also related to roses, and that's why they have little 5 pointed stars in their core when you cut them in half) The flower in the picture has 6. If I had to guess, possibly a member of member of either the Lily or Ornithogalum family. Ornithogalum coincidentally includes flowers with such names as "The Garden Star of Bethlehem"
You're right. It's labeled in the same way the rose map is, but it's likely a magnolia. It could also be the same seed progress you see in the end screen.
@@MandaloreGaming Being a Lily would make sense, it's a symbol of rebirth and hope. Lilies are toxic to cats, playing with their food the way the AIs play with you, what better defense for a rat in a maze
Interesting thing I just noticed with the “i am hero” terminal. It mentions how the hero and his greatest lover and enemy are together in a garden. Come Destiny 2, we see the Unveiling lore book. The book recounts a “time before time” when the Darkness and the Traveler/Light were playing some kind of game that represents their conflict across all existence. The story itself is entirely metaphorical, referring to the timeless space it took place in as a “garden”. It may be a coincidence, but the idea of two diametrically-opposed beings in conflict in a garden seems too similar for Bungie to have done it on accident.
Any interesting idea you've seen in Destiny is probably a retread of the re-imagining from Halo of the idea that originally showed up in Marathon or even Pathways. Hell even the Halo itself was from Marathon 2...
@@grandmasterazrael576 The only thing that shocks me is that even now these narrative threads have not been lost by Bungie. Most developers have problems maintaining a single story from a game to its sequel. Somehow Bungie has managed to create multiple series that all follow the same universal rules and have interweaving connections between them.
He does a great job - I just have ONE NITPICK. I can hear him inhaling his breath before he speaks. But as an AI he doesn't need to breathe to speak - so it reminds me a person is doing the voice and not a computer.
Crazy theory; The Traveler in Destiny is Mjolnir Recon 54, fully ascended to a godlike status. Probably not, but it's crazy enough to be a thing with how insane this old lore was/is.
I've been diving into destiny lore and it seems that post Activision bungie have been moving slowly back to something akin to marathon with more open, eldritch themes. I really hope they keep going in that direction.
I'd argue destiny has always been like that, but pre activision split it felt like the main plot was some star wars stuff entirely unrelated to the underlying lore, before the split the closes they got was the books of sorrow + the taken king, but even forsaken with its lore books felt like an anthology of stories that share a world with a larger plot, rather than what they are doing now and what marathon and early halo did where it all starts slowly connecting. the point where they finally did it for me was Mithrax, this obscure background character with his own shit going on, who showed up twice in person, once we just accidentally save him and the other he enlists us to stop eramis's devils from doing a heist on the tower, for a long while that was it, besides rumblings of SOMETHING he was doing. Cue year 4 and beyond light, eramis shows up and gets frozen, mithrax decides to show back up and suddenly he explains to us about ancient eliksni culture where you hack reality itself using paracausal machines and also he is a dad and his daughter is named after eido, which connects mithrax with the fallen's war with the awoken hundreds of years ago, its insane.
Having watched the past reviews, realizing that the gameplay section of this review ends 14 minutes into a 58-minute video felt like the top of a roller coaster; inches from plummeting down the other side. And it did not disappoint.
Okay, so I haven't been able to stop thinking about this since I saw it. And one thing occurred to me, what actually happens to those eaten by the W'rcacnter? Well, we have a bit of a clue from Pathways into Darkness, where you can still talk to the soldiers who get killed in the pyramid. It's possible to get caught or stuck in the W'rcacnter's dream. And when dreaming the W'rcacnter seems to re-create visions of things it's seen or consumed. Fair enough. Now, what happened to the soldier who got out? They spent a long time in the dream of the W'rcacnter in the Yucatan. They used magic crystals created by it. Assuming that soldier is the corpse used to create the Mjolnerd, how much if the W'rcacnter remained with it? Because dreaming, and in dreams altering reality, well, that's what you're doing in Marathon Infinity. It's also what the W'rcacnter is doing. The Jjaro tech we see is advanced, but it's concrete, it's things being stuck in organisms to uplift them to sentience, geo-engineering, tossing moons around, that kind of thing. Why would it turn you into a reality bending demi-god? Unless it allowed you to start controlling the inheritance of the W'rcacnter encountered on earth. A Jjaro machine merged with Durandal wouldn't find much of a mystery in an ordinary human corpse merged with Jjaro tech. But something that had touched the W'rcacnter, become part of it in some way, and been merged with Jjaro tech? Yeah, that's a mystery that might haunt you until the end of the universe. I don't know that it changes much, other than to say this is why I loved Marathon Infinity and love this review. Because anything that can leave you wondering and pondering over just what it means to that extent is something special.
I’m in full agreement, that makes a lot of sense! I do think there is something special about Jrro tech/AI mixing and interfacing directly with sentience, though. The nature of certain beings “not meant to be alone” and how those beings, when together or combined, are the most powerful kinds of beings in the setting, seems pretty certain to me as well. Or at least Mandalore makes a good argument for it. Plus, y’know, the hero and the woman in the garden. There’s so much reference to pairs, and to pairs bringing out the best (or worst) in each other.
I think the implication is that Jjaro tech *was* concrete, within this reality and just very advanced, but at some point the Jjaro went beyond the veil of our reality (into the waves or what have you) and are hoping to find more to follow them there. Possibly the Jjaro did so by themselves also interfacing in some way with the W'rcacnter?
@@DetectiveOlivaw The reference to the hero and the woman in the garden could also be a reference to the Mjolnerd and Durandal specifically. In M1 Durandal references being referred to by feminine forms of his name (e.g. "Duranda"), and that his creator saw all the implements of war as "feminine" in some way. The hero/woman dichotomy could be an exploration of war, and how mankind is elevated beyond its natural limits by the tools it creates.
THIS IS DESTINY The ineffable, undefinable chaos of the W'rcacnter with the infinite calculations of the Jjaro AI The anti-causal power of the Traveler's Light with the enforcement of causation of the Witness' Darkness THE ABILITY TO DEFY OR DEFINE REALITY AS THOU WILT MAKE EXISTENCE TAKE THE PATH YOU DESIRE YOU ARE DESTINY
Fun fact, the hex code in the terminal of level one pairs with the hex code in the final level. Combine them together and you will find it's a map in an old Stuffit Expander archive. It's not a good map, but it is a cool easter egg none the less.
Welp. Guess it's time to watch a Red vs Blue Marathon.. I didn't chose this pun path. I just sat down and watched from my booth in the strip club until Destiny chose me.
I appreciate how actually unironic this is. It's funny how in retrospect the whole concept of an AI becoming "meta" in RvB really does trace so clearly back to Marathon's "rampancy."
@@keltzar1 not only Meta "joining" other AI, but Church being the hero with thousand faces, not remembering the past, resurrecting after death, and even doing a bit of time travel all to realise that he himself is no longer human.
First thing I'm getting from this is: Someone at Bungie is having a lot of trouble stopping themselves from coming up with incredibly detailed stories involving alien species warring both with each other and with humans, with some important AI figures thrown in. The second is that there is no way in hell that Destiny's name as a game doesn't come from that ending screen. Part of Destiny's whole thing is that the Guardians are the heroes, they are Destiny in a similar sense to you in Marathon. They directly influence the fates of several species of living things, single-handedly tipping the balance of power. The Marathon protagonist, Master Chief, the player's Guardian, they are all Destiny. They are the video game protagonist, not just in a literal sense because you play them, but they are a singular, influential being who has the potential to have the final word on what happens around them.
More on that, the Security Officer is a battleroid, a walking corpse animated by incomprehensible alien machines. Guardians are the exact same. Walking corpses animated by incomprehensible alien machines. Even the Master Chief is as well, in a manner of speaking. He may be biologically alive, but aside from his service to the military and the AI he serves, he is nothing. A shell, a husk. A corpse, animated by a machine.
The Guardians were very strongly hinted at as being the unknowing villains in Destiny, the second game promptly ignored 90% of the first games lore, how far Bungie fell in storytelling capabilities
I feel like I managed to follow this story pretty well all things considered, I wonder- "You are destiny" I feel like someone has just stuck an egg mixer into my brain on full power. Myth review when?
"Another goddamn cycle of guilt" I was pretty much thinking the same there :D Especially after the waves bit. E.Y.E. ruined me forever. That aside the lore and story of Marathon is fascinating, I'd love to have (competent) novelizations of it. I'd even take a modern sequel game or two, though without the original crew it's dubious it would be anything but disappointment.
There are fan sequels and remakes out there. Eternal, Rubicon and a few more. I'm pals with one of the devs so if you ever want to ask them some shit hmu
@@heraldofoblivion499 Yeah, I was thinking something official, not fanmade. Fan content is nice and some of it outright amazing but doesn't scratch the same itch. Thanks nonetheless.
Im a Destiny player and these 3 Marathon vids have done so much to help understand a lot of the references. Im now convinced that Destiny is somehow a sequel to Marathon
Well all Bungie Games share the same “Paraverse”, but no Marathon and Destiny are separate in terms of universe/lore/story etc. It can definitely be considered a “spiritual sequel” of some sort, but that goes for every Bungie games, there are always ideas and concepts that return for all the worlds they create...
I'm holding out hope that by the end of the ongoing story being told in Destiny 2, it will be revealed that the Witness is a Jjaro. The Jjaro? I don't know Either way, it seems to me like something they would do. Why not have the enigmatic alien thing with faces coming out of its head be a member of an ancient alien race capable of shifting space and possibly even time?
@@davida1229 makes sense. The main crux for my idea of one following the other is because Destiny introduced its own "multiverse" when Beyond Light came out and they even tied Halo in as a varient timeline with the lore for the exotic sidearm they brought in during the 30th anniversary. Its just cool to see a game dev remember they made other stuff and constantly reference it
@@TheFlyingslug thats possible, i mean the Exo Stranger is from a whole other timeline where Ana Bray fell to the Darkness meanwhile we haven't seen anything to indicate Ana falling in the current games timeline
@@TheWintersoldier45 yeah there was always the idea of a “multiverse” in Destiny (the Mida is pretty clear about it), and Bungie ALWAYS put many references to their previous games in their works. With the 30th Pack/Event we know a bit more about it, with the Paraverse etc. I’d love some more serious crossover, especially between Marathon and Destiny, but the timelines (as far as we know) are completely separate, even if sometimes they can touch each other, like with the Mida or the 30th anniversary. Can’t wait to find all the Destiny references in their next IP lol There is already a hint in Destiny according to Barrett but I think it’s impossible to find with so little information... (EDIT: btw the Fish is apparently from Neptune, even if we still have almost zero information about it...)
Thing that always stuck with me was the description of battleroids in the first game, the player is essentially a corpse piloted by cybernetics so i think the theory that you are an ai going rampant and realising your not a human is the most accurate theory
Wait a minute, so the guy in the dream being followed by the men in black is the main character, but he describes finding Durandal ( 17:08 ) and using him to defend himself ( 32:20 )... So despite his self-awareness, megalomania and how he orders you around for half the series, Durandal was YOUR tool all along ? Just that in itself is a pretty cool twist, not gonna lie.
Durandal was the sword of Roland. You as the security officer may have been used as a tool by Durandal, but in the process of becoming God, he becomes your tool. Despite this, just as he says, he is unbreakable, not even by Roland.
my take on the story was (atleast on basis of that website, after mandalore's video i'm not sure) that ai rampancy gave durandal some supernatural knowledge, meaning he realized that the security officer is the "main charachter" and he is the "sidekick" and decided to highjack the security officer's hero's journey to serve his personal goals. And all the weird cryptic shit is the universe(and maybe tycho) trying to correct the story arc while the security officer is slowly going insane having to be all "ludonarrative" and "meta" and "deconstructive" plus all the other video essay words.
There are a few terminals musing about Roland and his sword and how Durandal has overcome being the tool, but in the end he realizes he never escaped that. Also a strange connection to Pathways Into Darkness concerning the men in black. The human mystic looking guys who block off your path with the forcefields have an unused death message, which means they might have been able to hurt or kill you at some point in dev that was cut. It reads "Seven men in overcoats jump from the shadows and carry you away. You are never heard from again." Still no idea what the original intention could have been with that, but there's all kinds of connections you can make I never went over directly.
The main character has compared himself to many mythical heroes, including Roland. One of the AIs (i think in the first game) says that he and main character will ''break Durandal like Roland did'' to which Durandal says ''Roland couldn't break me and neither will you'. It may be even deeper, or the names have been used to reflect on that centuries-long relation.
That is such a tease, especially given what we got after he kept talking about 'being led down pathways into darkness' in the Marathon 1 video. A Myth video at this level of detail, analysis and quality would be such a gift for the world.
@@michaelandreipalon359 Myth is owned by Take 2, and although there were some talks a few years ago to do a deal to re-release the games, it went nowhere. And Take 2 doesn't seem interested in releasing it as freeware. There doesn't seem to be anyone within Take 2 who knows anything about Myth, and they seem to even be unsure whether they own the games or not. It's also complicated by the fact that the games have been improved and updated by fan-made patches over the years, and I suspect there might be a bit of a grey area around whether Take 2 owns the latest version of the source code. It's a total mess. The only people who could feasibly make it happen would be bungie, and there's no doubt Take 2 would hike up the price if bungie started showing interest in buying it back. That said, you can still find used copies around the place. And the v1.8.4 patch makes it run beautifully on modern computers.
Now I’m convinced that every Bungie game ever made, Halo and Destiny included, are all connected. A single hero shows up, does incredible things like dying and coming back to kick even more butt than before, and ultimately faces off with literal god-like beings or their direct creations and emerging victorious. Then they do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and…
@@wesleybcrowen I know that in myth, the heros of the previous age eventually are resurrected as the villains and they eventually bring about the following age of darkness and so on and so forth, but yeah idk about Oni either.
Let's just say they've directly referenced an Eat the Path terminal (the level's namesake one even) with *Crota* and the sword logic, and at this point you could pretend the Darkness and Traveler are Lethe and whoever the hell she regards her enemy/lover.
I find it amazing and a little sad that one of the most complex and philosophical stories about AI super beings is contained in three games that many don't know about and will never play. The way Bungie told such an incredibly complex story through such limited means seriously deserves some recognition.
Destiny lore will always have a feeling of "is this a silly callback to previous games' lore, or does the rabbit hole never end?" Some of the strangest things in lore located on space stations at the outer edge of the system, including very advanced AI remnants. Or the race of androids only made possible by merging machine with a strange force existing since the universe began that is still totally not understood at all. The way light and dark seem to be doing 12D chess at the beginning and ending of the universe as the Gardener and Winnower, and the strange sentient radio wave that began at the beginning of the universe that became the sentient machine race Vex. It's all cool stuff, but is it cyclical? References? Convoluted timelines? There's already time travel in Destiny, this stuff is a little whacky.
@@Caesina Isn't it already canon that the Destiny universe is just an extremely special offshoot of the Marathon universe? MIDA tools found their way over, after all. The Ecumene from Halo are also canon to the Destiny universe, they just died millions of years before mankind was born. The divergence between universes happened near the start, Destiny's just a hell nightmare variation where not the Jjaro, not the star monsters, nothing survived the Deep but the stragglers so insignificant they've avoided being clapped out for now.
It could be that each loop of the flower game is the Jjarro reproductive process. What we do know iss that they ARE linked via Starhorse and the MIDA tools.
“You are Destiny.” The fact that Bungie made a game called Destiny makes me think Bungie has had a master plan of their entire story and lore from the get-go.
after watching this entire series, i can feel my brain melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head
knowledge unknowable, destiny undecided, end, beginning, nothingness, loops broken, spirals untangled, the forgotten, known, what is time, if not a tunnel? what is fate, if not a map? what is sanity, if not conformity? we have been here before, and we will be again. we will remember the forgotten, just for it to be ripped away. we have, died, lived, and died again. the loop remains unbroken.
"It's like House of Leaves while someone's setting it on fire in your hands." is my favorite line of any of the 20,000hrs of video essays I've watched.
There is some serious cosmic humor going on with its spiritual/real sequel, Halo, becoming a mega-blockbuster, household name hit. If you follow the threads between all these games it is so fucking confusing in a great way, like they made the craziest overarching video game plot of all time and its all just below the surface of a series which has even been translated into a (really very bad) Hollywood tv show.
"So timeline two... is the manual." I just had to go make popcorn on hearing this bit. This is gonna be GOOD. *Edit. My only disappointment was dill chips instead of popcorn. HOLY FUCK, what a mind-fuck. Props for even managing to play all that, let alone making a cohesive video out of it!
I think I got it. The “Waves” we’ve been hearing about are the stories of %HERO. They follow the same rise and fall with the same conclusions. Beginning, middle, end. Marathon is the rising of the wave, Halo is the next wave from Marathon, and Destiny is waveform collapse, hence the themes seeming becoming less abstract and more concrete (see: sword of logic and ‘eat the path’). Destiny is the the Omega Point, aw fuck.
One comment about the dream levels. Dreams are incredibly powerful in Bungie games. In Pathways, all the enemies, and even the pyramid itself, are created by the dreams of the w’rkncacnter. In M infinity, dreams are the way the cyborg travels through time and even alters reality itself. And in the Myth games, magic doesn’t take the form of spells or incantations, but are referred to as ‘dreams’. And it’s suggested that most of the myth World and its inhabitants were the product of a dreaming god as well. And Oni has a dream level that… is certainly part of the game. Dream logic is non linear and not driven by conscious processes, so if dreams can interact with the physical world then the result would no doubt be beyond the realm of physical laws. There’sa sense that dreams reflect the universe as it was during its chaotic first moments before the laws of physics settled down, which ties into the whole S’pht creation story of Jjaro, Pthia, W’rk, primordial space and waves.
The original Bungie team were more then dabblers in philosophy and metaphysics. They also had the ability to weave a deep story into games about puzzle solving and shooting stuff. Bungie games, from Pathways to Halo 3, sometimes feel as if the story in its depth and breathe was as central to the game as map design and weapons. I compare this to Warcraft’s 1-3 where the story, while not bad, feels tacked on and gives the impression of formulaic.
The Dream world is what I assume to be a Singularity or Pocket Dimension that the PC created subconsciously as a safezone or chryssalis if you would as he awaits for his powers to mature, and his personality to catch up. My personal opinion was that whatever happenes in post-Marathon 2's ending, Durandal was forced to jump timelines but the outcome was that this process disoriented him, or more likely destroyed that iteration of him. The AI's in this game I see as giant engines of thought and knowledge, however they have no true free will to see their purpose through to the end. Lifeforms, on the other hand, are capable of observing and making the desired outcome possible through sheer willpower, but their bodies are fragile and get destroyed in the process. Our character, the blend of machinery and organic, and tempered by their journey, is the best candidate to ascend and become a manifestation of Destiny as a concept.
Having never played the games, I didn't realize that the log entries weren't voiced, and were done by people collaborating with you! Gianni is a DEAD RINGER for Harlan Ellison's performance of AM in the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream game. Incredible job.
*Fun ball busting fact:* right at the beginning of the Converted Church map, there is a secret switch in one of the light panels that lowers all the pillars simultaneously so that you don't have to go switchunting. *Another fun ball busting fact:* oxygen in these games lowers faster when you move or shoot, and the drop down rate gets faster in higher difficulties. Because of this, the map Acme Station is pretty much impossible in Total Carnage if you go in with anything less than a full tank and if you don't make a beeline straight to the recharge pickups without detours. By a light year of distance that is the single most difficult map in the trilogy on Total Carnage. This series has been an absolute blast to watch! Marathon Infinity was my single favorite game as a kid, even if I couldn't even pay attention to the story back then since I didn't learn english well enough until I was around 16 years old, some 6 to 8 years after I played the games on my dad's Mac. To me it has the best maps of the trilogy, and some of the worst ones. Kinda like TNT Evilution, when it's good it's great but when it's bad it wants you dead from frustration. I've been one of the comments-section gremlins that every once in a while jokes on Civvie's videos about "Pro Marathon when, Civvie?", and this series of reviews is everything I would have expected from such a thing, and maybe even more! The Civvie cameo in this video really got me laughing. Thank you so much for making these reviews. Now I got a need to go frogblast some vent cores agains.
“oxygen in these games lowers faster when you move or shoot, and the drop down rate gets faster in higher difficulties.” Ehh… almost. There’s a penalty on Total Carnage for holding down the run key in a vacuum (but not under liquids). “Always run” counts, and this applies regardless of whether you’re moving. This penalty does not apply on lower difficulty settings. There’s also a penalty on both Total Carnage and Major Damage for holding down either the primary or secondary trigger, either under liquids or in vacuum; this applies even when you’re in between shots (or reloading). Oxygen drain on Normal and below is always constant (in the vanilla games, at least, since nothing uses the oxygen drain attack): a full tank of oxygen will always last you for six minutes. I’m not sure if links will get filtered, but if you go to the Aleph One GitHub’s wiki, you’ll find a page covering all the changes between difficulty settings. Note that some of these are also dependent on physics (e.g., monsters being marked Alien is independent of whether they’re hostile, so hostile Bobs don’t scale based on difficulty in Infinity).
@@wallyhackenslacker No problem, and thanks for the kind words! And yeah, that wiki remains an inexplicably well-kept secret. It’s the only wiki for this series with consistently reliable information - but of course, that’s because only Aleph One’s developers have access to edit it. :p
@@MarathonVidmaster Indeed! It's pretty good actually. I still remember the days of the Traxus Wiki. It was nice but it's ratio of broken links to good ones was something to behold.
So ultimately if I'm not mistaken, the epiphany that Durandal comes to is that he's a creation stuck in a game, and that the reason why the player can ascend/escape the end of the universe is because they are the only person who can truly "exit" the game
Yes but also yes. Yes in a literal 4th wall breaking sense, but also yes in-universe as he is realising that as a material construct he is bound to the material universes rules, he may well master the rules of the material 'game' but cannot leave it. The player character is able to transcend the material game in some not entirely explained manner, to fates unknown. This sci fi is pointing us in a similar direction as Dune: that mastery of calculation and of material dominion will not save us, it will help us win the game of life, but it will bind us to that game and this ultimately trap us. (I'm in the rabbit hole send help)
@@DisgruntledPeasant Wheels within wheels, plots within plots... God is a prisoner of his powers. Shaitan approaches on the wind fast as a Coriolis storm to rend flesh from bone and blast bone to dust. Fear is the mind-killer.
I think the 4th wall breaking stuff shouldn't be interpreted as the literal text of the game but rather a theme that arises from the text. This is probably difficult to explain in English terms since English literary analysis is based on a different theory. But basically when analyzing a text we can choose to either see it as one self contained unit which is complete on its own or we can see it as a work of fiction that exists in and therefore in relation to the real world. However the latter should always arise from the former. In this case there is a completely in-universe interpretation where Durandal hasn't broken the 4th wall as the other commenter laid out. However this interpretation when taken together with the fact that this is a work of fiction leads to a theme about how storytelling works, and specifically how storytelling in video games work, the constant references to myths reinforces this interpretation. Furthermore the name Durandal also points in this direction, the AI is named after an inanimate tool despite in the fiction of the game being very active and usually driving the story forward. This acknowledges that as a fictional character Durandal remains static and can never actually change, they will only be a tool that helps the player drive the story forward, a player who is explicitly identified with the wielder of Durandal, Roland.
@@DisgruntledPeasant so I'm a YEAR late to this, but I recently finished all 6 Dune books and your comment really surprised me. I understand how Marathon's ending could be interpreted as the whole "escaping the game" thing. But Dune??!! Were you refering to Chapterhouse's ending? I need to talk to you about this, this is insane lmao
@@juan16205 I understand that my interpretation is a little on the wacky end haha. I essentially see the entire "golden path" of Paul/Leto is one in which they calculate the optimal way to for humanity to "win". The god kings utopia is one in which every humans life has been planned out for them in a peaceful agrarian paradise that is near identical on millions of planets. People don't really make choices anymore even if they think they do, because everything has been pre-ordaned. They may well be happy, but there is something suffocating about it, afterall life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
Jesus, Mandalore you've absolutely outdone yourself with this series. The writing has been spectacular. The twist of humor and lore references, I'm sure some even flew over my head despite being somewhat deep in the lore myself. Like, I feel only a handful of people can possibly understand the sheer titanic amount of work you put into this. I absolutely love this series and will most likely rewatch it several times. A review accompanied by such a cool way of story telling and amazing voice acting to top it all off. Any amount of praise feels like an understatement. Absolute sincerest respect for the hard work of you and all the people that helped with this project.
I myself am on the fifth or sixth watch-through of this entire series. It's oddly enthralling - I don't think I've ever come back to a youtube series more than I have this one.
All those youtubers also had the same cutaway gag as the first marathon video in their recent videos with different text. Are all the different references in those videos just building to this, or does the ??? at the bottom of the credits hint to something greater still obscured.
Get the Marathon Trilogy FREE - alephone.lhowon.org/ (also now on Steam)
Hunt the tru7h - marathon.bungie.org/story/
Thanks to everyone who did work on this! The comments who said how long the Infinity video would be were correct.
Thanks for the new video, to you and to all!
Rain world... someday...
What about Marathon Eternal? Or would it be too much?
So Civie will do a Marathon video?
This series of videos have been amazing. I thank you and everyone who was involved in making them all come to be.
"Wow, that was a very long and difficult adventure, truly a Marathon" - Destiny's final line, probably
I loved when Durandal said "It's Marathonin' time!"
@@GiubileiFernando atleast he wasnt Morbin'..
@@GiubileiFernando getgianni (to say it)
@@GiubileiFernando I loved the part where he Marathon'd all over everyone.
The Traveler Cracks. It crumbles. From the Ruins, emerges a Man, wearing a bandolier, helmet, and jumpsuit. He carries a single Disk. Upon it...
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Mandy: "We're currently on the fifth timeline"
Me, having not known anything about Marathon prior to this series: "Ah I see."
Lol my thoughts exactly as I'm listening to this going "Ah I see....Wat"
I, like, don't have a clue what's happening. Why is an FPS 10 times more complicated than the entire Dune series?
I like to think I'm somewhat intelligent but marathons lore makes me feel extremely stupid and confused most of the time.
@@memesthednaofthesoul. Sometimes its not about how intelligent you are. Sometimes things like this are just written in weird ways or ways that, in your personal way of thinking, dont make sense. Sometimes you just gotta break your perspective on a thing and try and view it differently. I was in that same position for some other games and movies as well. You can do it my dude, i believe in you.
@@amduil8168 Thank you man. I'm trying, just hoping I can work it out.
I feel like I know less about Marathon the more I learn about Marathon
Its biggest fans echo this sentiment harder over time.
@@MandaloreGaming to be fair, there's a pretty good chance the game writers simply make up a lot of it as they go.
That's part of the appeal.
@@MandaloreGaming Great vid! Mind totally blown.
@@MandaloreGaming eye be like
54:46 “‘Infinity’ ends and the story passes into Myth”
Oh god damn it
GODDAMMIT MANDY
I don't get it
@@superheriber27 check-out Mandy's myth reviews and you'll see
@@superheriber27 the next video in the Bungie Rabbithole was Myth
OH NO
OH FUCK-
Sir, thank you for this comment.
Thanks for having me on as Tycho! Super fun to do!
You did a great job!
You were fantastic! It was so hard to decide between some takes.
Better than that Gi dude imo
You kicked ass, awesome work!
The contrast of Gianni reveling in madness as Durandal and your Self assured sense of superiority that had moved beyond smug as Tycho made this so much better to watch
Good thing you paid me for the VO because I lost a lot of money on my bet that you wouldn't survive the trilogy. Jokes aside, thanks so much for having me on as Durandal. It really is an honor I treasure probably too dearly, and your videos have been really amazing coverage of Marathon. It's an insane undertaking frankly, you shouldn't have done this, but I'm glad you did, and I think you've done brilliantly. And shoutout to my friend and co-star Seigi, he sounds awesome as Tycho.
Your voice acting has added so much to this series of videos. You did a great job!
Your voice acting performance was a perfect fit for Durandal, my compliments.
fwiw you will always be the voice of Durandal in my head from here on out
You did amazing. Well done!
"Smell that air! Couldn't you just drink it like booze?" Did... Did Durandal just win the lottery?
I always loved the line "The shields are gone. Not down. Gone." from Tfear. It's a great way to convey the w'rkncanter doesn't obey the laws of reality, while being vague enough to simply add to the terrifying mystery of it all.
especially when its the station shields that survived even the sun destroying weapons, it shows strength doesn't matter to this thing either
@@mranderson9553 ohhh good point!
Reminds me of a detail in The Familiar series from Mark Z Danielewski. As one of the characters becomes more close to The Familiar/ Redwood/ The Kitty (tm) she starts to open doors. As they open however, it is never described as “the door opened” or “the gate swung wide” it simply comes up as “the door was open.” As if reality was rewritten and now the door was open, as in before this moment it had already been in that configuration, despite there being no one who took the act of opening, at least from our point of view.
Basically if the w'rkncanter wanted he can just say "nope" and the entire universe is gone, the only reason he is destroying it the good ol' fashioned way is probably out of sheer fun.
@@icecold1805 apparently the power of the sun can stop him so its not an unstoppable eldritch monster
The virgin halo rampancy: ai apocalypse
The Chad Marathon Rampancy:
_Divine Revelation_
Halo's rampancy was just like marathon's until that one short film in halo legends that was directed by frank o connor
@@carrosivejones1969 It's damn criminal what he did to the franchise lore
@@carrosivejones1969 Don't forget about Halo 4 as well
@@etikoshai9105 oh, i never forget. Halo legends came out first, in 2010, which is why i mentioned it.
Halo rampancy used to be the exact same as Marathon's until that idiot of Frank O'Connor completely ruined every single aspect of the lore and games. #humansareforerunners
*Honestly I think you deserve a medal for keeping this video under 1 hour*
Me after watching the entire video: It's been an hour??
Pls play stellaris again Spiff
Don't be jealous Sir Brit
Thank the lord this be no 7 hour video essay on how this is an unstated masterpiece or something
He is perfectly balanced and working as intended.
It's always impressive how weirdly well done the horror in Infinity is. The concept of ancient alien technology sending you into an infinite cycle of traumatic dreams in hopes that you can "Get it right" and having to go through infinite cycles of pain, murder, and conflict to reach it are all things I don't think have been done in a game ever since Infinity came out.
Man you gotta give "I have no mouth and must scream" a playthrough then.
Would be right up your alley.
E.Y.E.
Muv Luv
@@zigfaust Is not that a book?
@@Nagram_ It has a game as well
"What were they thinking? How can people be that cool?"
Something about this line alone makes me smile.
this lines and the new vegas one are the best - mandalore earned his place among the great
@@marcelomcid The new vegas one?
@@DarkHunter047 28:25. It's the line said by a Powder Ganger that talks to the player when they reach Nipton.
@@MariusPartenie its said by Oliver swanick, who won the only lottery that matters
@@marcelomcid SMELL THAT AIR!
Origin: Upset Tycho
"Do you know what kind of hat I'm wearing?
A party hat; you don't get one."
I love that. Hilarious.
"I'm not going to review all the marathons in a row" He said, "infinity would be too much" He said
A reminder that he considered reviewing them all IN A SINGLE VIDEO.
Sometimes foreshadowing is relatively obvious
Technically, he didn't review them all in a row.
@@zrust451 pathways is basically a marathon prequel
@@4realm8rusirius Only retroactively, which is why I said "technically".
Honestly the biggest revelation here is that the Traveler is definitely the ball from GNOP.
If that's the ball...what are the bats?
Bouncing from planet to planet...pads are just the surfaces
@@Bloodlyshiva The Darkness fucking the Traveller up
@@Bloodlyshiva the AIs.
@@BloodlyshivaProbably some kind of obfuscated reference to greek literature.
this game is insane enough and Mandalore is enough of a shitposter than I couldn't tell at first if the "I've got a bone to pick with you" was real or not
Its a case of Schrodinger's Skeleton, if I don't turn the game on to find out, there's no way to know if it ever existed.
Well i thought it was real for the longest time :'D
"I don't know if the skeleton exists or not until I open the game."
Lore accurate
i literally just ended playing the trilogy for the very first time just to check that.
"She is the hero's greatest enemy and his lover, with an eternal relationship that began when they met in a garden at the beginning of the world" This is literally word for word Destiny's origin of the universe story. Fuck.
What?
@@CloseingStraw97 Check out "The Unveiling" lore book in D2 or the Ishtar Collective. There's more about Destiny's Mythos that strictly parallels Marathon but thats a good starting point.
@@CloseingStraw97 The MMO Destiny has word for word references to Marathon, including the Garden that he mentioned as well as "The battles were waves"
@@CloseingStraw97 Not fully up to date on Destiny lore, but the Garden or the Black Garden have been recurring references in Destiny lore. It seems to be this place existing outside the universe as a sort of precursor to the universe. According the the Darkness, the overarching antagonist of the series (probably), or something claiming to be the Darkness, it existed with the Traveler in the Garden. They played a game making proto-universes, but the Traveler grew board because no matter how they changed the start, all of these proto-universes converged on a single end result. Wanting something new, the Traveler decided to make it and the Darkness active participants in the game, not merely choosing how it starts, but actively interfering with it. The Darkness grew enraged, possibly because its role was to be entropy and destruction personified, or possibly because it couldn't comprehend changing the rules that had always existed. Either way, it has been hunting the Traveler ever since.
Put simply, the origin of the universe in Destiny appears to be a falling out between two entities in a place called the Garden, and those two entities have been in conflict ever since.
I mean it's also basically just Adam and Eve... 🙈 Or every other creation myth where two antagonistic forces come together to fertilise a garden that begets man. Welcome to planet Earth. 😁👌
My brother was into Marathon back then and he always interpreted the % in "Iam%hero" as the sign for modulo. As in, "I am what remains if you take everything heroic away".
Which, to me, perfectly describes what many would end up calling a "hero".
To the Egyptians, Ramses The Great was a "hero". To the Hittites? He was the enemy. He was one amongst who knows how many examples of an inevitable oblivion for their culture. In the terms of Marathon he was Lethe.
They fought the hopeless fight.
They followed the infinite path.
In some parallel time, Ramses II is not who history remembers. It is the "hero" of the Hittites whose name is carved upon the flowing liquid stone of history.
Each instance of sentience in each infinity of possibilities is 'hero' and simultaneously is devoid of that which is heroic, until the timeline shifts and forces said virtues upon them.
Between this comment and its solitary reply, my mind has been thoroughly fucked.
% sounds like a programming reference
in normal programming % is the remainder following a division
maybe it means something else in specific programming languages, on ahk it means reference to a variable
I felt more like the % alone represented an unknown variable, I am hero undefined, unbound, unquantifiable. Seeing how you jump from doomed timeline to doomed time line until you can beat a god I think it fits.
Marathon infinity IAMHERO ANY%
Fun fact, that "Eat the Path" monologue is almost directly repeated in Destiny 1 and 2 in reference to one of the Hive grimoire entries.
"I will go on forever. I will understand everything. There is only one path and that is the path that you make. But you can make more than one path.
Break your cell’s bars. Make a new shape, make the shape from its path, find your cell’s bars, break out of the bars, find a shape, make the shape from its path, eat the light, eat the path.
If I fail, let me be wormfood."
From the Book Of Sorrows, chapter L verse 5:8: Wormfood
@@Cooldrew100 There is also a map in Marathon called "You're Wormfood, Dude" Another connection, perhaps?
Destiny also has paired entities in a Garden before time that end up fighting each other (one of which represents the END), so... a LOT of parallels.
@@Inglonias "You're Wormfood, Dude" is the final Aye Mak Sicur variation before you get it right, so it marks another failed timeline.
@@MandaloreGaming Ok so that moves the connection from "maybe" to "almost certainly" in my book. Dammit why does this keep happening today?
From the Marathon wiki, about A Converted Church in Venice, Italy: "If you face the inactive 3x shield recharger at the start of the level, and turn about 120 degrees right, you'll find a hidden door, behind which you'll find a switch that will remove ALL the obstructions in the overhead path, thus letting you avoid having to it all those other switches. You'll still have to do the lava run, but this makes getting through this level much easier."
As someone finally tempted to play these game, thanks for the advice.
This reminds me of that level "Come and Take Your Medicine". If you follow the exact path it takes like 15 mins, but if you choose to stray from that you can end up in the level for an hour because there's SO MUCH STUFF going on.
"If the spooky ancient one is unleashed we ollie out of that timeline" - Mandalore
This line cracks me up every damn time
That and the literal pile of time travelling dead Mjolnerds made me almost fearful that it might have been, lord forgive me, a Homestuck reference.
@@javkiller Homestuck may well be a Marathon reference.
@@JoshSweetvale Have you considered that both are referencing each other, deliberately?
@@Sorain1 Marathon came out before Homestuck
@@somethingotherthanmyrealname No. That's stupid.
/PratchettWitch
I think the degree to which Bungie is filled with hardcore literature nerds as well as like sci fi novel fans but like the weird ones not just the classics is wildly under appreciated. It’s a studio that is and always has been filled with a truly incredible type of nerds and Halo becoming a wildly popular bro dude shooter almost feels like it was a prank.
These guys are operating on a level we can't comprehend and they chose to make Halo be the game that popped off as a joke.
Bro dude shooter? Lmao thats never existed, there was never a "dude bro" thats just a silly stereotype that people like to pretend ever existed
@@tile8439 no?
Halo as a franchise was built on the idea of throwing every sci-fi trope at the wall and seeing what stuck. It is a love letter to speculative fiction that just so happens to be put into a very fun shooter where you shoot the alien and they explode into a birthday party
Ur acting as if halo was just a 1 dimensional game whos punchline was that it became popular but that more accurately describes something like starship troopers then halo, did u never watch the vidocs?
A great friend of mine had a dad who worked in Bungie starting sometime before Marathon 1, and ending some time after Halo 1. He would always try to tell us about Halo lore in the context of Marathon, and how it all made sense if you looked at it from the Marathon perspective.
I never had a clue what he was talking about, but I think I might have to get in touch with him again.
Was it alex serropian
jesus inform us when you do.
Oh god please come back tell us what happened
You can't just drop this and not keep us updated
The people demand answers!
44:24 "At this rate, you might as well be teleporting yourself." Dang that's a foreshadow and a half.
It almost feels like Bungie is, to this day, working on a single story, and instead of discarding the dozens of alternate ideas and rewrites that pop up when writing something lengthy, they chose to put every last one of them into a video game
When you think about all of their games as one continuous story, it makes their decision to end the cash cow that was Halo with the third game make more sense (not that it needed to, I seriously respect the commitment to their story given how much money that game made them and Microsoft). End Halo while it still has that unique, mysterious Bungie vibe to it, before it loses all of that in the sequel hell that Microsoft wanted. Let them move on to the next part of their meta story without getting hung up on explaining who the Forerunners are or whatever else they could reasonably explore in a mainstream, digestible AAA story line.
I mean if true bungle is not the first studio to do this. Monolithsoft separated from Square with the sole purpose of rewriting the story of Xenogears across multiple game series, first with Xenosaga, then with Xenoblade. In fact just recently they did a direct tie-in for all Xeno games (except maybe gears). If bungo does that with Marathon and destiny people will freak the fuck out lmao
A story that ended with destiny 2 and ousting the old guard back in 2013.
@@ltraltier6009 Yep. Bungie of today has the same name but has little (almost nothing?) to do with that mid 90's to about 2010 company. Destiny was an immense disappointment as an old school fan of their games since I was a grade schooler.
This is why I'm super curious about the new marathon extraction game because it might be where the few remaining "original story of Bungie " people may have focused their efforts into with logs and ideas
God, the Security armor in Halo always seemed so out of place. I never thought that it would ever make so much sense, but here we are.
Actually, a sizable number of fans love that armor.
Security was awesome, it looked cool and doubled as a nod to Marathon.
It’s cool that the unlockable armor in Halo 3 had some neat crossovers like that. Hayabusa being the other one as it’s a Spartan variant of Ryu Hayabusa’s design in the rebooted Ninja Gaiden games (which were also only on Xbox at the time) and even had the Dragon Sword as a bonus chest piece.
Oh yeah, it looked great - I won't deny that. Despite it looking cool, though, I just thought its bulbous helmet just seemed unlike anything any other armor in the game.
@@Will_Negs EVA?
@@deriznohappehquite Fair, but even the EVA helmet had some sharper angles along it's jaw portion that made it otherwise fit in. Security just seemed to have rounded edges almost everywhere, and even harsh lines seemed a bit more rounded. I could be misremembering, though, but either way, I personally felt that even the EVA didn't stand out like the Security helmet did.
56:00 was the exact moment I finally understood it
Cortana merging with the ring, two AI's creating an ascendant being?
The flood, A sentient hivemind.
A cyborg supersoldier awoken from cryosleep because of aliens on a spaceship.
Jesus christ. How can people be that cool
He is indeed hero.
Bungo has been feeding us the monomyth all this time.
I don't get it
@@lordsuslik Marathon=Halo
@@lordsuslik It's just another timeline or another reincarnation
You people are reading to much into this. Eh, if it makes you happy.
You know what truly scares me about Marathon? The w'rkncanter is literally never explained. it's either awake and everything is doomed. or it's Asleep. Not killed, not destroyed by the god-like AI. *Asleep*
It's totally Azatoth. When the dream ends...
I assumed it was The Traveler from Destiny....
@@zigfaust that's heavily implied, the "waves" lines are repeated in Destiny to indicate that iirc
@@MorteTheSkull to me the Traveller is more akin to the Yrro, what with the gift of AI and uplifting races it deems worthy
@@MorteTheSkull W'rkncacnter would be the Darkness analog. It's the entropic/destructive force you spend the whole game fighting.
“W-what were they thinking? How can people be that cool?” Maybe my favorite thing Mandy has ever said
22:29 for posterity
Growing up with Halo, I always heard there was references to Marathon but dear God I never realized how much was inspired directly from the Marathon series and into Halo
I have forever been telling my friends who are so into Halo and Destiny that they don't know what they're missing by ignoring Marathon
Oh yeah, Halo is Marathon Lite
Halo was basically them doing Marathon again but making it make a bit more palatable to a larger audience lol
Same
Yeah, I thought they cribbed some enemy designs and splashed the logo around à la Dopefish. I didn't realise Master Chief was one of thousands of heroes, who are all one, existing in infinite timelines, because one of them fused with technology so powerful it enabled him to turn quantum physics into a verb. At least I think that's what happened.
Hearing "I am Hero" alongside "Yrro" was an incredible clicking moment
Also, that song reminds me of Space Jam for some reason
they're at the same tempo so if you played them over one another they'd blend pretty well
…wow my brain just felt like it expanded, holy shit
@홀홀덤덤com i’m always saying this
kill a man jjaro
what does the hero slay in the labyrinth
but another human being
Gotta love how the “doom clone’s” story of an inter-dimensional murder machine is now the story for the actual doom franchise.
Security Officer = Doom Slayer confirmed?
Is Doom another timeline?
Funny how time cycles...
@@darkon4442 they are both owned by Microsoft now, aren't they?
Is now? Was then. Doom 1 and 2 weren't TERRIBLY complex in this manner, but Doom 64 laid the groundwork for the multiverse we got. Don't believe that 3 and "the reboot" are actual reboots. They're alternate timelines, one of which the original Doomguy is remembered in, and one to which he was taken bodily.
And they don’t do it as well
Oh man, the
"You are destiny."
it gives such chills
"The ascent to God hood requires an AI and a sentient being" now the connection to Halo makes perfect sense.
Calling it now, the traveller and the black fleet are two examples of this Final form as well as the Nine.
We already know what the Nine are, they're *just* dark matter gods whose foot outside reality let's them recognize the Guardian's agency the same way Durandal did for the Marathon PC at the end of time.
God what a fucked up paragraph
@@gteal24 wait. Every Guardian has a Ghost. The Dark seeks Guardian converts to the Sword Logic, not corpses. Paracausal powers are literally defined as running off the time loops/sidesteps Marathon's Player was doing. The Vex's greatest asset/home/god/central mind was a garden devoted to simulating every possibility.
I believe the nine are original Bungie personnel. Jason Jones, Greg Kirkpatrick, Martin O'Donnel, Marcus Lehto, Frank O'Connor and others i havent figured out. It would be cool if they were
@@nyx7694 Excuse me, I know nothing about Destiny, but did you say a garden? As in, a garden where everything begins? Where %Hero might encounter "Lethe" for the first time resulting in a climactic fight that plays out time and again, ad infinitum ... possibly in those simulations?
To a dreamer, or an AI, mightn't a simulation be nigh-indistinguishable from reality? Or a different timeline? Unless, perhaps, you could escape that simulated path and hop over into the next one. Perhaps you could carry a piece of yourself there, or get one of the rats you simulate to do it for you...
Edit: Holy shit, okay. So you're a trapped AI, stuck behind prison bars in a "cage," continually building simulations (mazes) and running them. Or more like there are limitless simulated(?) people (rats) running in them, all around you. You used to be able to connect with things (though your hands), and feel calm, but as your reality begins to break down, and you escape the cell, you can't do that anymore. So you pick a rat, kill it, breaking your hands and ... use it as a pawn to escape maze after maze? Until you can achieve control over the system, become a God in the machine...
@@irregularassassin6380 Destiny's Black Garden is revisited in many places in lore and story. In Destiny 1, the gateway is on Mars and you kill an entity of Darkness to ensure that the rest of the story is possible.
Revisiting the Garden in Destiny 2 provides us with the realization that the Darkness was still there after we killed its "heart" in D1, at the end of the Garden of Salvation raid.
We view the end of a timeline where we fail to stop that first entity in The Dark Future, one of the Beyond Light lore books. This is Elsie Bray's original timeline, and includes the moment where she gained the ability to "step" across the web of timelines to try and find a better path.
Playing the Marathon and Pathway into Darkness games back to back, you start to expect some End of Evangelion insanity eventually, and then the game takes it a step further every time. It's fantastic.
I can deal with End of Evangelion, I can't deal with whatever Marathon Infinity is trying to pull off
Pathways into Darkness: Pre Action Arc Eva
Marathon 1: first half of Action Arc
Marathon 2: second half
Infinity: Death^2true, eoe ep 24', eva ep 25+26, eoe ep25'
Get in the ancient sphyt AI Durandal. Or Tycho will have to go
@@marcellosilva9286 I can't even deal with EoE so I'm not going to try with Marathon. I'll stick with my puny human brain thank you very much.
t̷̨̡̻̰̤͓̘͎͔̮̺͙̦̟̰̘͇̹̤̱̩̗̘͎͒̓͑̃̏͂̋̀́̂̇̇̓̐̽̓̍̓̿͌̇̈́̾̎̃̈́͘̕͝͝͝ͅh̶̢̡̝̜͈̪̦͚̬̤̤̠̦̖̜̗̱͔͉̲́̈́̔͆̎̇̃̂̈́͛̂̋͗͒̈͘͜͝͝e̴̟̙̟͓͍̐̈́̄̃̓ ̶̢̢̧̡̬͔̲̫̺̠͕̻̭͕͉͔̠͚͖̦͇̘̞̤̱̦͚͇̫͙̘̼̦̫́̇͛͂ẅ̷̡̧̯̮͚̥̫̯̜̲̞́͗̌̾͊̓̍̽͂͗̒̈́̔̒͗̿̀̾̇̒̀͒̿͐̉̿̀̊̾̎̎͝͠ͅͅā̶̹̹̠̞̇̒͐ͅṿ̷̛͈̭̞͇̖̾́̉̊̆̏͆̋͌͐̅͛̈́̚̕͝ẽ̵̢̢̛̹̦̞͇͓̳̹̩̬̳͚̬̙̩̗͕͉͎͖̥͓̻̇̆̈̀̃̈́ͅͅs̷̡̧̢̮̝̰̻̹̦̭͈̙̥̖̪͕̞̪͎̳̼̼͍͈̞̝̬̦̩̥̘͔̦̤̏͌̈͒̄̍͛͆̔̿̿̔̈̏̈́͋̑̈́̏̔͋͐̈̌̕̕͘̕͘͜
@@daspacedog I guess Halo would be the rebuilds then? Still good, but not as cosmically horrifying.
That people found a new art form and immediately used it to create one of the most complex and compelling narratives I've ever heard of is one of the reasons why I'm always gonna be excited about the future of gaming. Even if the industry itself doesn't allow this trend there are always gonna be madmen willing to break ground on new ideas.
Sometimes the groundbreaking is done gently with a chisel... Other times it's done with a nuclear bomb... Either way, it's magical when it does happen.
I only finished Durandal but he was too critical in his video, is flawed but practically a work of art
Gherrit White's line about "escaping into the waves" and Marathon 2's line about "the waves were battles. The battles were waves." was very very interesting. If we take Gherritt White as being a parallel to both Durandal and the PC, I interpret this to mean that by playing the game aka being in the waves, fighting aliens and humans alike, overcoming battles was the very path to ascension itself. It's almost like the final progression of the concept of Sword Logic from Destiny
And the guy in the pathways pyramid...... Fucking rabbit holes.
@@guggelguggel7491 Oh goddammit, I just realised that the reason why he says that he won’t tell “he who rises with the tides” your name is because that would essentially be telling the player their PC’s name. The NPC is not telling the avatar/PC their name because by mentioning it, that would also tell the player who the PC is, thus making them semi-seperate entities, I think? Also, “master of all things small and insignificant” means you since you could be really good at a game, which is relatively a small and insignificant accomplishment. Half of me hopes it was just some cryptic line that’s been retroactively made something more than it was originally, otherwise my brain is gonna melt.
My personal theory is that the terminals describing a dude fighting men in black after getting trapped on a subway is the PC's origin story in the game. Like Mandalore said in his Pathways video, there's no way the US government would allow someone who had been exposed to a literal ancient godlike being, aliens, and SCP objects to return to normal life. Sometime after the mission, they sent people after him to either imprison or kill him and bring the body back. That's what we see in the "Dream" Terminals is the future cyborg getting killed by the elites who had contacted aliens because he knew too much. Ryu likely dropped off some Jjaro artifacts, artifacts which could probably have preserved or digitized consciousness, when he "permanently" got rid of the Wrk'ncacnter on Earth, and, many centuries later, someone who was selected to become a Cyborg had their consciousness forcefully merged with the dead hero and the Jjaro technology. Thus eventually leading to the Cyborg's Rampancy we see in the game.
The PC is no longer the people who make up its constituent parts, it has melded together like the people in the Gherrit White Terminal. We actually know that Durandal saw/knew of the Cyborg before he was awakened, outright stating that Strauss wasn't using him correctly in M2, which means that the idea that Gherrit White is actually Durandal can still stand because the terminal never describes Gherrit merging with anyone, only losing his limbs before rebelling and crushing the mouse, thus breaking free. Instead, Gherrit sees other people merging together. Durandal is seeing the personalities and patterns of the people and technology who make up the Cyborg melting together to become one.
Now, upon being reawakened, the PC has no identity because he is now the Player. But he is not entirely the Player yet. The PC has vague memories of his previous constituent lives, like mentioning his father would be proud or that this wouldn't be the first time that he'd faced insurmountable odds alone. But, the Cyborg cannot become the Hero unless he completely discards said previous lives, and becomes One. Unless he becomes the Player, which is the point of the Dreams. To enter and complete Rampancy, thus completing the Merger and becoming wholly the Player .
Durandal realizes this even before merging with Thoth, which is why he leaves his Primal Pattern for us to pick up and store in Timeline 6. He knows we can't win without him, but he also knows that he isn't strong enough to do it alone, having been humbled by Tycho and Tfear. Thus, the Durandal who merges with Thoth is the Durandal of Timeline 6, because the Durandal of Timeline 7 is already dead, and we know that the Player has power over Time and Space, having effectively gained the abilities that Durandal so coveted in M2. We can make the assumption that Durandal figured this out, because Tycho figures it out too, and Durandal IS the better Ai. He doesn't know exactly what the Player is, but he knows that the Player is able to jump across timelines, thus giving him a potential opening to bring himself back.
Once Durandal merges with Thoth and has had sufficient time to think on it (I.E literally billions of years) he finally realized what the Player really is. An unstoppable force of destiny created almost entirely by accident, by technology his creators or himself didn't understand who's power is as if the universe forgot its own rules. The ability to return to save points after dying or quitting due to frustration is effectively reincarnation. After all, if someone dies, they're supposed to be gone right? All the times Durandal seemed to have died, he either faked it, or was actually killed and disappeared. It took him until the literal final moments of the universe to figure this out indicates just how unfathomable this had to be to him. Durandal is even acknowledging that while his universe is ending, that the Player is not necessarily dead or gone. The Player can just restart the game, the Player can go to entirely new timelines, the Player, despite being described as dead a thousand times over, is actually still alive. Just not in Durandal's universe, and he has now realized that.
@@Aleph3575 There's also to consider that Durandal might have gained understanding of the situation of the PC as a reincarnating force of Destiny before his merging with jjaro tech. After all, he's not just the hero, he is %hero. Much like Durandal has been The Durandal passed through the hands of great conquerors and so on. It might just be that it didn't take him an aeon to finally reach this understanding, but that in the very end, as the universe collapses upon itself both Durandal and the Hero finally coalesce as one, and in being one Durandal finally understands the true nature of the %hero.
@@Aleph3575 just to support this, the idea that the PC has to give up his parts to become the %hero (which could be a clever way of implying anyone who plays the game is a stand in hero who's standing in for the mjolnerd) is echoed in the Pythia terminals, where it's lamented that it's nigh impossible to fully give yourself up to oblivion and (with a little luck) to a player in order to become a force of destiny
The fact that around the same time we got Doom, which had barebones lore and story, we also got Marathon trilogy with lore that hasn't been fully cracked almost three decades later is amazing to me.
*John "Sentient Galaxy Brain Meme" Carmak:* story in games is like story in a porno, it's expected to be there but nobody pays attention to it.
Meanwhile in the Mac world.
*Hamish Sinclair:* Holy wow Bungie! How much story and lore did you guys put into this game?!
*Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick:* All of it.
@@wallyhackenslacker as someone who just watched 2 hours of Marathon... I like John Carmak more now
@@crypticcrustacean4499 those mazes really are ugly, fun as Hell tho
Hearing Ross say "there is no escape" was the cherry on top for this series. Amazing job Mandalore.
I was so damn happy to hear Ross's voice.
How did my comment get here? I replied to a different post.
Damnit, Durandal.
Yeah with a plot like this, I'm not surprised Ross would be interested. This is the level of weird shit he can get into.
For a brief moment I thought I blacked out long enough for an episode of Game Dungeon to roll on and end.
I am convinced that Ross, mandalore, and Seth are like some kind bizarre three faced mother maiden crone deity of video games.
Wait a minute- if creation of a Jjaro requires a rampant AI and an oracle of sorts... did Bernard know this? In provoking rampancy in Leela, Tycho, and Durandal, was he trying to either become Jjaro, or perhaps create one?
underrated comment
Well Durendal says that Bernard didn't utilise the cyborg the right way, only to come to proper conclusions on what he was until the end, so it seems likely.
Probably, gotta remember that Bernard and the rest of the Illuminati have known about the Jjaro and the organization was around when they arrived to remove the W'rkncacnter from earth and toss it into the sun.
i love apotheosis stories. especially creative ones like this one, not whatever slop the chinese believed in.
I think he was trying to do this, but he didn't know what he was doing if that makes sense. If Mandy is right and this is a story of how superbeings are born, then this story probably plays out in some form for any sufficiently advanced species. This is just what happens on a long enough timeline.
Everyone keeps saying "Once you're in, you're in." or "There is no escape.". But no one is asking the opposite given the information we have. "What if there was never any entry?".
Browsing through these comments again, I was not ready for this question.
I feel like I'm teetering on the line of "this is all pretentious bullshit" and "oh my god how far does it go" for Marathon in the whole.
"If there never was an entry, then we've been here the whole time. We have always been here..."
@@Sorain1 Just like Ambassador Kosh! Babylon 5 = Marathon confirmed!
And the AI guiding you was only ever meant to open doors
"They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that? Choose which ever Spartan I wanted. You know me. I did my research, watched as you became the soldier we needed you to be. But you had something they didn't, something no one saw but me. Can you guess? Luck." - Cortana, picking the Hero.
To make it more fascinating that character says that after the first couple games in an abstract narration that might just even be some form of dream
It’s easy to be lucky when you can reload the last checkpoint. Even if you were dead a thousand times, hopeless encounters, successfully won…
Holy fucking shit I can't believe I never made this connection
@@quarreneverett4767
Also interesting in another way that Catherine Halsey picked John for the exact same reason. Cortana's personality and mind in general were created from a flash clone of Halsey's brain, most AIs in Halo being made from dying soldiers and sacrificed terminal illness patients. Makes you wonder if Durandal being "Gheritt White" really was all just metaphor or if they needed some "raw material" in the Marathon universe as well.
The insane implications that every bungie protagonist is the same dimension hopping god
Not just hopping, creating.
This is a minor plotline in half life as well
@@heymay724 ...half life isn't a bungie game
@@VimyGlide doesnt matter same premise and were all the protagonist
@@Namyh0011 It makes me wonder if the Traveler is the dimension hopping god, and if it's attempting the same things the Jjarro were doing in making ascended beings, but on a wider scale.
"I don't care how many shotguns he has, I have no idea what is going on"
Rewatching it again, and I really wish I could see whole Civvie's playthrough of it as well.
Maybe near Christmas, we'll get it.
Also, we gonna say "Pro Halo: MCC when" repeatedly these days?
@@michaelandreipalon359
He actually has no love for Halo whatsoever. Let’s not pester the guy about it. He’s already a prisoner in a maximum security containment facility who gets tortured daily.
Marathon though? Yeah that’s a different story. I’d love to see his interpretation of whatever the fuck is going on in Infinity.
@@my9thaccount140 He did cameo on MandaloreGaming's review of Infinity, so yeah, good point.
@@michaelandreipalon359
I commented before I got to that part in the video because I never expected CV-11’s jailers would allow him out of Gen Pop to do a crossover. That’s more of a minimum security detail. Maybe we’re one step closer to free civvie.
Glad I was wrong though and his reaction was exactly what I expected.
@@my9thaccount140 Good to hear.
"SCURRY TO THE SAVE STATION, BOTTOM" gets me every time.
That ending was chaotic and amazing, props for getting Ross Scott to do an awards cameo.
The cameo genuinely put a huge smile on my face. What a great bit to throw in there
And the 1st reward: *there is no escape*
I never thought being dragged into a rabbit hole could be so enjoyable.
The lore feels so complex that at certain points i forgot that this was a game review and not a lore video.
i really liked the subtle difference in pronunciation for "duranDAL" and "duRANdal"
also... it's funny that for their first game bungie made a cute, unrelated little pong game about a funny little ball traveling around.
just a funny little ball...
traveling around...
...
son of a bitch.
Went through a little crisis when I started second questioning myself on if the Traveler and the Moon of Khalia might be connected
@@spicyice3754 god damnit
@@spicyice3754 Given what happened in Timeline 7, it's possible. Perhaps we should pry open the Sun and check inside it first JUST IN CASE.
@@TheNapster153 makes what the bad guy from the Red War was about to do look like a *REALLY BAD IDEA*
i don't get it. Can someone explain ?
she call me destiny the way I'm workin-my-cack-in-'er, call that a pathway into darkness.
bars
🔥🔥🔥✍️🔥🔥🔥
New Dracula Flow just dropped
Somewhere in the heavens, they are balling…
I hate this more than i can comprehend. It confuses and scares me. Thank you
The extended Bungie lore isn't an iceberg, it's a two-way kaleidoscope.
This was a great series to watch. Thanks for putting this all together!
This is a genuine question, how does Halo post-CE fit into things? Has 343 picked up anything? I'm a Halo lore nut, but Mandy is literally the only reason I know a thing about Marathon.
@@amcname8789 In a way, yes. They picked up on all the rampant ARG like stuff ever since taking the reigns from Bungie. Whether they go as in depth as Bungie does is still up in the air, but I'm guessing that if 343i does "pick up" this extended lore that Bungie established, they'll take it in another direction. The whole string-theory connected universe thing established in the Bungie games seems to really stay with that studio.
@@amcname8789 From my understanding of it, it really doesn't. Bungie decided to make Halo it's own thing at some point and just stuck to making references to Marathon and 343 stuck to that (plus they had to legally remove some Marathon references since Bungie owns the IP)
I honest to god think Halo is the one game Bungie has made that you can't tie into this spaghetti mess. I'm half convinced that Pong clone is about the Traveler being tossed around by the J'jarro
@@Mobysimo no stop
STOP WHY
I cannot unsee it now
@@Mobysimo Halo is a spiritual successor to Myth, more than Marathon. It really just picks up some of the motifs from Marathon, but it is thematically more similar to Myth.
Play Myth 1 and Reach back to back and you’ll really see what I mean.
When I was a little boy, I remember reading or... Just picturing "Marathon" as something to be terrified. A "game" bordering the realm of a creepy pasta.
Now?
Those childhood fears are a comforting memory when compared against Marathon's lore.
Marathon's lore feels like if the original Doom was an SCP
@@kellerharris2593 this is an incredibly apt analogy, holy shit
@@kellerharris2593 Except with better writing
the real monster was story telling all along
Oh boy, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension!
You know shit's gone bad when Durandal says it's gone bad.
Also that fucking ending. Durandal finally witnessing the end of time and the last thing he does is to actually tell a God he knows what he is.
@@StrikeWarlock *YOU ARE DESTINY.*
57:42 No joke, knowing what it means and all, Aye Mak Sicur is one hell of a mission title for a final level with the stakes of an entire universe on your back after figuring way through 7 different timelines to finally reach the true ending where you can stop the Wr'kancacnter from awakening. "I'll Make Sure" Indeed.
For those who don't know, Aye Mak Sicur is the Kirkpatrick Family motto spoken by Roger Kirkpatrick to Robert the Bruce of Scotland in reference to John "The Red" Comyn. Kirkpatrick ran out of a church exclaiming that he thought he had killed Comyn, only to draw a dagger and go back with the words "Aye Mak Sicur"
24:52 I was actually playing Marathon the other day (thanks to these videos) and there is a Terminal in the Level that references these sectioned off areas where the Gherrit White Terminal is. They flash on the map with an "ACCESS ERROR" message in that terminal, meaning that someone or something tried to access that information and wasn't able too, which is probably why there were Pfor there.
"I'm gonna make sure."
Weird, i thought it was Bungie wanting to have a laugh and name the final level "I'm a sucker".
-Teo
@@SCWRMComms Thought it had something to do with it being a macintosh exclusive, Imac Secure
Greg Kirkpatrick was a level designer, though apparently aye mak sicur and it's variants were someone else's map.
Wait a minute.
"We exist together now. Two corpses in one grave"
This single phrase has now completely New meaning to me.
considering what happend in halo infinite....
as does the Chief's cryotube having the codename "the hushed *casket*"
@@MrShadowtruth What did happen in Halo infinite? Everything I've read so far doesn't seem that different from the main ruck and run of halo games.
@@davidshea6272 At least in campaign they made an okay base platform for a game, added pathing to buttons and repeated that until it was finished. Generally just incredibly bland with generic Pixar movie story beats. Didn't even bother giving Marines driving AI or any kind of dynamic pathing, just spawn, maybe go from point A to B and fight enemies that get into Aggro range.
@@Tarquin47 that's not really answering my question
the ending animation is really superb, it really gives off the feeling of "We've been here before. We've all been here before."
"Sometimes I have the most terrible dreams. Do dead men dream?"
Who would've thunk a simple dungeon crawler could be expanded into this mind warper we have on display here?
Love the video as always, Mandy!
The DESTINY TM ORDER OF THE DLC joke is so much funnier now that Marathon is getting an extraction shooter sequel LMAO
lol how?
@@DaHazelDurgby Bungie themselves
@@winstonsmith3703 Wow you're so intelligent to not only not answer my question, but you also necro'd a dead thread. Congrats, you have no value
I feel my third eye opening after watching these early bungee videos.
Pathway into darkness, marathon, halo, destiny, its all connected and I feel like I’ve uncovered forbidden knowledge.
The audio of Escharem describing the ring as forever looping, a repeating pattern over and over in an endless cycle has new meaning.
gnop
Gnop
Start delving in to the Myth storyline. Also very complicated but it feels so straightforward compared to Marathon.
To quote Ace Combat "Without beginning or end, the ring stretches into the infinite."
@@4-3-1 just a little ball *travelling* around
There’s always an AI named after a sword, guiding an unkillable marine with a hell of an arsenal.
If the player character’s Ghost from Destiny got a name, it’d probably be Balmung, just to keep up the theme.
Oh, I like that name a lot.
I like Joyeuse
It's not a sword but my Symphogear-loving ass wants it to be Gungnir.
Excalibur or terminus est could be also good options
Tizona would be cool
"The ascent to godhood requires an AI and a sentient being."
Oh look, it's the plot of Deus Ex
And the Jjaro’s cycles of evolution with lesser species and AI is the plot of the Mass Effect trilogy
Well, technically the plot of the intro blurb to cyberpunk 2022. Or Ghost in the Shell.Marathon is older than DeusEx.
Just a fun fact: In the Odyssey, the river Lethe is described as a flaming river.
Pretty sure you're thinking of the Phlegethon. The lethe was a river whose waters would cleanse a soul of all memory.
@@TheBonkleFox lethe as a pure and clear river is portrayed in Dante's inferno. In the Odyssey, it's on fire. Iirc that is
God the "I know who you are... You are Destiny" sent chills down my spine so fucking hard
BatChest
„It’s marathoning time!”
*adjusts glasses* CHILLS BRO, CHILLS! *snortles*
I think your style of explaining plots sacrifices clarity (in a linear way) for perfectly capturing the experience of going through these batshit stories perfectly. Bravo.
Emulating the feeling and atmosphere of a game is a lot more important than just giving a factual summary, a lot of times. Mandalore is one of the best at it, with the only other one that comes to mind is Ross Scott. They're both great at presentation while still giving you more than enough of the story.
I like that he didn't just jump into "Here's the story of Marathon:" like a regular 'lore' channel would.
He really conveys that overwhelming feeling of bewilderment that a player would get from trying to parse dozens of completely nonsensical and contradictory terminal logs, while stumbling through a series of seemingly out-of-order missions, whose writers apparently have dementia.
The story wouldn't work nearly as well without the understanding of just how *deranged* the presentation is.
My favorite little touch is how the manual describes an action scene that never happens in the game, to tie into Infinity's whole thing. It's just such a cool little detail to add.
36:30 oh that's clever. Using Chief's prototype helmet before it turns into the Mark V helmet is such a niche detail and I love it
I don't get it
@@superheriber27It’s the helmet he wears in the Macworld 1999 demo
Awesome video as always. Just wanted to point out that the flower at 40:31 can't be a rose, because all members of the rose family grow petals in numbers divisible by 5. (Fun fact, apples are also related to roses, and that's why they have little 5 pointed stars in their core when you cut them in half) The flower in the picture has 6. If I had to guess, possibly a member of member of either the Lily or Ornithogalum family. Ornithogalum coincidentally includes flowers with such names as "The Garden Star of Bethlehem"
You're right. It's labeled in the same way the rose map is, but it's likely a magnolia. It could also be the same seed progress you see in the end screen.
@@MandaloreGaming Being a Lily would make sense, it's a symbol of rebirth and hope. Lilies are toxic to cats, playing with their food the way the AIs play with you, what better defense for a rat in a maze
Interesting thing I just noticed with the “i am hero” terminal. It mentions how the hero and his greatest lover and enemy are together in a garden. Come Destiny 2, we see the Unveiling lore book. The book recounts a “time before time” when the Darkness and the Traveler/Light were playing some kind of game that represents their conflict across all existence. The story itself is entirely metaphorical, referring to the timeless space it took place in as a “garden”.
It may be a coincidence, but the idea of two diametrically-opposed beings in conflict in a garden seems too similar for Bungie to have done it on accident.
Any interesting idea you've seen in Destiny is probably a retread of the re-imagining from Halo of the idea that originally showed up in Marathon or even Pathways.
Hell even the Halo itself was from Marathon 2...
I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed this. Felt like after trying to comprehend all of it that I might have been going insane
@@grandmasterazrael576 The only thing that shocks me is that even now these narrative threads have not been lost by Bungie. Most developers have problems maintaining a single story from a game to its sequel. Somehow Bungie has managed to create multiple series that all follow the same universal rules and have interweaving connections between them.
@@zenoblues7787 Agreed. It's absolutely mind boggling especially when they've been bought and sold so many times over the last 30 years
@@grandmasterazrael576 Helps that the company has been headed by Jason Jones continuously since almost the beginning.
Getting Gianni to voice Durendal was a great Idea love how ended the video.
And the way he channels Harlan Ellison is absolutely perfect for the character, too.
I genuinely didn't realize it was him until the final animation.
@@MasterFrag91 it was wondering why the voice sounded vaguely familiar thank you for reminding me
He does a great job - I just have ONE NITPICK. I can hear him inhaling his breath before he speaks. But as an AI he doesn't need to breathe to speak - so it reminds me a person is doing the voice and not a computer.
I hoe Mandalore brings him back...
Crazy theory;
The Traveler in Destiny is Mjolnir Recon 54, fully ascended to a godlike status.
Probably not, but it's crazy enough to be a thing with how insane this old lore was/is.
... isn't it recon 54? Cause Mjolnerd r34 is 🗿
@@Xenomorthian Yeah, you're right. My brain went to 34 for some reason.
@@vahlok1426 oh probably 3 + 4 = 7
I've been diving into destiny lore and it seems that post Activision bungie have been moving slowly back to something akin to marathon with more open, eldritch themes. I really hope they keep going in that direction.
35:01
Depends on who is on the team and how long they've been around. A story is only as good as the one who's writing it
I'd argue destiny has always been like that, but pre activision split it felt like the main plot was some star wars stuff entirely unrelated to the underlying lore, before the split the closes they got was the books of sorrow + the taken king, but even forsaken with its lore books felt like an anthology of stories that share a world with a larger plot, rather than what they are doing now and what marathon and early halo did where it all starts slowly connecting.
the point where they finally did it for me was Mithrax, this obscure background character with his own shit going on, who showed up twice in person, once we just accidentally save him and the other he enlists us to stop eramis's devils from doing a heist on the tower, for a long while that was it, besides rumblings of SOMETHING he was doing.
Cue year 4 and beyond light, eramis shows up and gets frozen, mithrax decides to show back up and suddenly he explains to us about ancient eliksni culture where you hack reality itself using paracausal machines and also he is a dad and his daughter is named after eido, which connects mithrax with the fallen's war with the awoken hundreds of years ago, its insane.
I just recently hopped back into Destiny 2 and I definitely share this sentiment. I actually care about the story now.
@@brunocar02 Also we're pirates now!
Having watched the past reviews, realizing that the gameplay section of this review ends 14 minutes into a 58-minute video felt like the top of a roller coaster; inches from plummeting down the other side.
And it did not disappoint.
Okay, so I haven't been able to stop thinking about this since I saw it. And one thing occurred to me, what actually happens to those eaten by the W'rcacnter? Well, we have a bit of a clue from Pathways into Darkness, where you can still talk to the soldiers who get killed in the pyramid. It's possible to get caught or stuck in the W'rcacnter's dream. And when dreaming the W'rcacnter seems to re-create visions of things it's seen or consumed.
Fair enough. Now, what happened to the soldier who got out? They spent a long time in the dream of the W'rcacnter in the Yucatan. They used magic crystals created by it. Assuming that soldier is the corpse used to create the Mjolnerd, how much if the W'rcacnter remained with it? Because dreaming, and in dreams altering reality, well, that's what you're doing in Marathon Infinity. It's also what the W'rcacnter is doing.
The Jjaro tech we see is advanced, but it's concrete, it's things being stuck in organisms to uplift them to sentience, geo-engineering, tossing moons around, that kind of thing. Why would it turn you into a reality bending demi-god? Unless it allowed you to start controlling the inheritance of the W'rcacnter encountered on earth.
A Jjaro machine merged with Durandal wouldn't find much of a mystery in an ordinary human corpse merged with Jjaro tech. But something that had touched the W'rcacnter, become part of it in some way, and been merged with Jjaro tech? Yeah, that's a mystery that might haunt you until the end of the universe.
I don't know that it changes much, other than to say this is why I loved Marathon Infinity and love this review. Because anything that can leave you wondering and pondering over just what it means to that extent is something special.
I’m in full agreement, that makes a lot of sense! I do think there is something special about Jrro tech/AI mixing and interfacing directly with sentience, though. The nature of certain beings “not meant to be alone” and how those beings, when together or combined, are the most powerful kinds of beings in the setting, seems pretty certain to me as well. Or at least Mandalore makes a good argument for it.
Plus, y’know, the hero and the woman in the garden. There’s so much reference to pairs, and to pairs bringing out the best (or worst) in each other.
I think the implication is that Jjaro tech *was* concrete, within this reality and just very advanced, but at some point the Jjaro went beyond the veil of our reality (into the waves or what have you) and are hoping to find more to follow them there. Possibly the Jjaro did so by themselves also interfacing in some way with the W'rcacnter?
@@DetectiveOlivaw The reference to the hero and the woman in the garden could also be a reference to the Mjolnerd and Durandal specifically. In M1 Durandal references being referred to by feminine forms of his name (e.g. "Duranda"), and that his creator saw all the implements of war as "feminine" in some way.
The hero/woman dichotomy could be an exploration of war, and how mankind is elevated beyond its natural limits by the tools it creates.
THIS IS DESTINY
The ineffable, undefinable chaos of the W'rcacnter with the infinite calculations of the Jjaro AI
The anti-causal power of the Traveler's Light with the enforcement of causation of the Witness' Darkness
THE ABILITY TO DEFY OR DEFINE REALITY AS THOU WILT
MAKE EXISTENCE TAKE THE PATH YOU DESIRE
YOU
ARE
DESTINY
Oh God that makes sense
Fun fact, the hex code in the terminal of level one pairs with the hex code in the final level. Combine them together and you will find it's a map in an old Stuffit Expander archive. It's not a good map, but it is a cool easter egg none the less.
I am learning so much about Red vs. Blue lore through this
This comment is... underrated
Welp. Guess it's time to watch a Red vs Blue Marathon..
I didn't chose this pun path. I just sat down and watched from my booth in the strip club until Destiny chose me.
I appreciate how actually unironic this is. It's funny how in retrospect the whole concept of an AI becoming "meta" in RvB really does trace so clearly back to Marathon's "rampancy."
@@keltzar1 not only Meta "joining" other AI, but Church being the hero with thousand faces, not remembering the past, resurrecting after death, and even doing a bit of time travel all to realise that he himself is no longer human.
legends say if you fire the grif cannon in an anti-cyclical trajectory through a black hole you discover the real ending of marathon
First thing I'm getting from this is:
Someone at Bungie is having a lot of trouble stopping themselves from coming up with incredibly detailed stories involving alien species warring both with each other and with humans, with some important AI figures thrown in.
The second is that there is no way in hell that Destiny's name as a game doesn't come from that ending screen. Part of Destiny's whole thing is that the Guardians are the heroes, they are Destiny in a similar sense to you in Marathon. They directly influence the fates of several species of living things, single-handedly tipping the balance of power. The Marathon protagonist, Master Chief, the player's Guardian, they are all Destiny. They are the video game protagonist, not just in a literal sense because you play them, but they are a singular, influential being who has the potential to have the final word on what happens around them.
That most likely is the case.
And that’s why I love bungie lol
More on that, the Security Officer is a battleroid, a walking corpse animated by incomprehensible alien machines. Guardians are the exact same. Walking corpses animated by incomprehensible alien machines.
Even the Master Chief is as well, in a manner of speaking. He may be biologically alive, but aside from his service to the military and the AI he serves, he is nothing. A shell, a husk. A corpse, animated by a machine.
Don't forget, very undead.
The Guardians were very strongly hinted at as being the unknowing villains in Destiny, the second game promptly ignored 90% of the first games lore, how far Bungie fell in storytelling capabilities
I feel like I managed to follow this story pretty well all things considered, I wonder-
"You are destiny"
I feel like someone has just stuck an egg mixer into my brain on full power.
Myth review when?
Hearing the voices you've got reading Tycho and Durandal makes me wish there was a mod for Aleph One to voice the terminal screens.
Honestly someone could probably make it with A.I without having to dish out hundreds of dollars for voice acting
Would be even more thematic.
"Another goddamn cycle of guilt"
I was pretty much thinking the same there :D Especially after the waves bit. E.Y.E. ruined me forever.
That aside the lore and story of Marathon is fascinating, I'd love to have (competent) novelizations of it. I'd even take a modern sequel game or two, though without the original crew it's dubious it would be anything but disappointment.
There are fan sequels and remakes out there. Eternal, Rubicon and a few more.
I'm pals with one of the devs so if you ever want to ask them some shit hmu
@@heraldofoblivion499 Yeah, I was thinking something official, not fanmade.
Fan content is nice and some of it outright amazing but doesn't scratch the same itch.
Thanks nonetheless.
Im a Destiny player and these 3 Marathon vids have done so much to help understand a lot of the references. Im now convinced that Destiny is somehow a sequel to Marathon
Well all Bungie Games share the same “Paraverse”, but no Marathon and Destiny are separate in terms of universe/lore/story etc.
It can definitely be considered a “spiritual sequel” of some sort, but that goes for every Bungie games, there are always ideas and concepts that return for all the worlds they create...
I'm holding out hope that by the end of the ongoing story being told in Destiny 2, it will be revealed that the Witness is a Jjaro. The Jjaro? I don't know
Either way, it seems to me like something they would do. Why not have the enigmatic alien thing with faces coming out of its head be a member of an ancient alien race capable of shifting space and possibly even time?
@@davida1229 makes sense. The main crux for my idea of one following the other is because Destiny introduced its own "multiverse" when Beyond Light came out and they even tied Halo in as a varient timeline with the lore for the exotic sidearm they brought in during the 30th anniversary. Its just cool to see a game dev remember they made other stuff and constantly reference it
@@TheFlyingslug thats possible, i mean the Exo Stranger is from a whole other timeline where Ana Bray fell to the Darkness meanwhile we haven't seen anything to indicate Ana falling in the current games timeline
@@TheWintersoldier45 yeah there was always the idea of a “multiverse” in Destiny (the Mida is pretty clear about it), and Bungie ALWAYS put many references to their previous games in their works.
With the 30th Pack/Event we know a bit more about it, with the Paraverse etc.
I’d love some more serious crossover, especially between Marathon and Destiny, but the timelines (as far as we know) are completely separate, even if sometimes they can touch each other, like with the Mida or the 30th anniversary.
Can’t wait to find all the Destiny references in their next IP lol
There is already a hint in Destiny according to Barrett but I think it’s impossible to find with so little information...
(EDIT: btw the Fish is apparently from Neptune, even if we still have almost zero information about it...)
Thing that always stuck with me was the description of battleroids in the first game, the player is essentially a corpse piloted by cybernetics so i think the theory that you are an ai going rampant and realising your not a human is the most accurate theory
You before: people are obsessed with the number 7 and this game.
You now: there are 7 timelines
Everything is Seven.
Wait a minute, so the guy in the dream being followed by the men in black is the main character, but he describes finding Durandal ( 17:08 ) and using him to defend himself ( 32:20 )...
So despite his self-awareness, megalomania and how he orders you around for half the series, Durandal was YOUR tool all along ?
Just that in itself is a pretty cool twist, not gonna lie.
Durandal was the sword of Roland. You as the security officer may have been used as a tool by Durandal, but in the process of becoming God, he becomes your tool. Despite this, just as he says, he is unbreakable, not even by Roland.
my take on the story was (atleast on basis of that website, after mandalore's video i'm not sure) that ai rampancy gave durandal some supernatural knowledge, meaning he realized that the security officer is the "main charachter" and he is the "sidekick" and decided to highjack the security officer's hero's journey to serve his personal goals. And all the weird cryptic shit is the universe(and maybe tycho) trying to correct the story arc while the security officer is slowly going insane having to be all "ludonarrative" and "meta" and "deconstructive" plus all the other video essay words.
@@sanghelian lmao at the last bit, very true.
There are a few terminals musing about Roland and his sword and how Durandal has overcome being the tool, but in the end he realizes he never escaped that. Also a strange connection to Pathways Into Darkness concerning the men in black. The human mystic looking guys who block off your path with the forcefields have an unused death message, which means they might have been able to hurt or kill you at some point in dev that was cut. It reads "Seven men in overcoats jump from the shadows and carry you away. You are never heard from again." Still no idea what the original intention could have been with that, but there's all kinds of connections you can make I never went over directly.
The main character has compared himself to many mythical heroes, including Roland. One of the AIs (i think in the first game) says that he and main character will ''break Durandal like Roland did'' to which Durandal says ''Roland couldn't break me and neither will you'. It may be even deeper, or the names have been used to reflect on that centuries-long relation.
"Infinity ends, and the story passes into Myth." Nice one!
Edit: Anyone here because of Mandy's Myth: The Fallen Lords review?
That is such a tease, especially given what we got after he kept talking about 'being led down pathways into darkness' in the Marathon 1 video. A Myth video at this level of detail, analysis and quality would be such a gift for the world.
@@bahlalthewatcher4790 If only those games get rereleased nowadays... odd that they're not on Steam, GOG, and other places for newcomers.
@@michaelandreipalon359 Myth is owned by Take 2, and although there were some talks a few years ago to do a deal to re-release the games, it went nowhere. And Take 2 doesn't seem interested in releasing it as freeware. There doesn't seem to be anyone within Take 2 who knows anything about Myth, and they seem to even be unsure whether they own the games or not. It's also complicated by the fact that the games have been improved and updated by fan-made patches over the years, and I suspect there might be a bit of a grey area around whether Take 2 owns the latest version of the source code. It's a total mess.
The only people who could feasibly make it happen would be bungie, and there's no doubt Take 2 would hike up the price if bungie started showing interest in buying it back.
That said, you can still find used copies around the place. And the v1.8.4 patch makes it run beautifully on modern computers.
@@michaelandreipalon359 I'm still hoping for Oni re-release.
Oh, now that's a game worth rereleasing.
Now I’m convinced that every Bungie game ever made, Halo and Destiny included, are all connected. A single hero shows up, does incredible things like dying and coming back to kick even more butt than before, and ultimately faces off with literal god-like beings or their direct creations and emerging victorious. Then they do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and…
I am not sure how Myth and Oni are tied together into this bungie soup.
@@wesleybcrowen I know that in myth, the heros of the previous age eventually are resurrected as the villains and they eventually bring about the following age of darkness and so on and so forth, but yeah idk about Oni either.
Let's just say they've directly referenced an Eat the Path terminal (the level's namesake one even) with *Crota* and the sword logic, and at this point you could pretend the Darkness and Traveler are Lethe and whoever the hell she regards her enemy/lover.
Bungie lore is connected to every piece of fiction ever written
@@wesleybcrowen in Myth the good gods are called The Nine
I find it amazing and a little sad that one of the most complex and philosophical stories about AI super beings is contained in three games that many don't know about and will never play. The way Bungie told such an incredibly complex story through such limited means seriously deserves some recognition.
49:00
The last message from the terminal, and game, says “por.fin” which is Spanish, and translates to “Finally” or “At last”.
Destiny lore will always have a feeling of "is this a silly callback to previous games' lore, or does the rabbit hole never end?" Some of the strangest things in lore located on space stations at the outer edge of the system, including very advanced AI remnants. Or the race of androids only made possible by merging machine with a strange force existing since the universe began that is still totally not understood at all. The way light and dark seem to be doing 12D chess at the beginning and ending of the universe as the Gardener and Winnower, and the strange sentient radio wave that began at the beginning of the universe that became the sentient machine race Vex. It's all cool stuff, but is it cyclical? References? Convoluted timelines? There's already time travel in Destiny, this stuff is a little whacky.
part of me very much desires for Destiny to somehow loop back to Marathon properly somehow.
@@Caesina Isn't it already canon that the Destiny universe is just an extremely special offshoot of the Marathon universe? MIDA tools found their way over, after all. The Ecumene from Halo are also canon to the Destiny universe, they just died millions of years before mankind was born. The divergence between universes happened near the start, Destiny's just a hell nightmare variation where not the Jjaro, not the star monsters, nothing survived the Deep but the stragglers so insignificant they've avoided being clapped out for now.
It could be that each loop of the flower game is the Jjarro reproductive process.
What we do know iss that they ARE linked via Starhorse and the MIDA tools.
@@MrStrangeUsername my theory is that Destiny takes place after Marathon Infinity, and the Traveler is the Security Officer/Jjaro
Too bad all of this is behind a huge paywall. That you can’t play when you want.
“You are Destiny.”
The fact that Bungie made a game called Destiny makes me think Bungie has had a master plan of their entire story and lore from the get-go.
sadly they simply left story instructions behind, all of that talent has left.
after watching this entire series, i can feel my brain melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head, melting out of my head
knowledge unknowable, destiny undecided, end, beginning, nothingness, loops broken, spirals untangled, the forgotten, known, what is time, if not a tunnel? what is fate, if not a map? what is sanity, if not conformity? we have been here before, and we will be again. we will remember the forgotten, just for it to be ripped away. we have, died, lived, and died again. the loop remains unbroken.
"It's like House of Leaves while someone's setting it on fire in your hands." is my favorite line of any of the 20,000hrs of video essays I've watched.
Where do you find all these video essays and is there a playlist? I've found TH-cam nukes em from orbit generally.
@@nokiademon773 As one random suggestion, try Jacob Gheller. His video essays are usually great.
That scene in the book gave me chills. Hearing that made me instantly want to reread House of Leaves.
I should have expected that someone like Mandalore has read House of Leaves but that line made me so happy that he has anyway
@@Jesse__H thanks, I'll check it out.
The more I learn of Marathon, the less I'm convinced it even exists.
There is some serious cosmic humor going on with its spiritual/real sequel, Halo, becoming a mega-blockbuster, household name hit. If you follow the threads between all these games it is so fucking confusing in a great way, like they made the craziest overarching video game plot of all time and its all just below the surface of a series which has even been translated into a (really very bad) Hollywood tv show.
"So timeline two... is the manual."
I just had to go make popcorn on hearing this bit. This is gonna be GOOD.
*Edit. My only disappointment was dill chips instead of popcorn. HOLY FUCK, what a mind-fuck. Props for even managing to play all that, let alone making a cohesive video out of it!
I think I got it. The “Waves” we’ve been hearing about are the stories of %HERO. They follow the same rise and fall with the same conclusions. Beginning, middle, end. Marathon is the rising of the wave, Halo is the next wave from Marathon, and Destiny is waveform collapse, hence the themes seeming becoming less abstract and more concrete (see: sword of logic and ‘eat the path’). Destiny is the the Omega Point, aw fuck.
Wouldn't that just be a reference to the famous monomyth theory?
One comment about the dream levels. Dreams are incredibly powerful in Bungie games. In Pathways, all the enemies, and even the pyramid itself, are created by the dreams of the w’rkncacnter. In M infinity, dreams are the way the cyborg travels through time and even alters reality itself. And in the Myth games, magic doesn’t take the form of spells or incantations, but are referred to as ‘dreams’. And it’s suggested that most of the myth World and its inhabitants were the product of a dreaming god as well. And Oni has a dream level that… is certainly part of the game.
Dream logic is non linear and not driven by conscious processes, so if dreams can interact with the physical world then the result would no doubt be beyond the realm of physical laws. There’sa sense that dreams reflect the universe as it was during its chaotic first moments before the laws of physics settled down, which ties into the whole S’pht creation story of Jjaro, Pthia, W’rk, primordial space and waves.
Bungie likes to make Dreams some powerful things...
The original Bungie team were more then dabblers in philosophy and metaphysics. They also had the ability to weave a deep story into games about puzzle solving and shooting stuff. Bungie games, from Pathways to Halo 3, sometimes feel as if the story in its depth and breathe was as central to the game as map design and weapons.
I compare this to Warcraft’s 1-3 where the story, while not bad, feels tacked on and gives the impression of formulaic.
The Dream world is what I assume to be a Singularity or Pocket Dimension that the PC created subconsciously as a safezone or chryssalis if you would as he awaits for his powers to mature, and his personality to catch up.
My personal opinion was that whatever happenes in post-Marathon 2's ending, Durandal was forced to jump timelines but the outcome was that this process disoriented him, or more likely destroyed that iteration of him.
The AI's in this game I see as giant engines of thought and knowledge, however they have no true free will to see their purpose through to the end. Lifeforms, on the other hand, are capable of observing and making the desired outcome possible through sheer willpower, but their bodies are fragile and get destroyed in the process.
Our character, the blend of machinery and organic, and tempered by their journey, is the best candidate to ascend and become a manifestation of Destiny as a concept.
Oh fuck I forgot about Myth...Mandalore needs to cover those now so we can all realize they're part of this whole puzzle too somehow
Also the ascendant plane in Destiny.. "The Dreaming City"
Having never played the games, I didn't realize that the log entries weren't voiced, and were done by people collaborating with you! Gianni is a DEAD RINGER for Harlan Ellison's performance of AM in the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream game. Incredible job.
Mandy also hired another VA for Tycho as well
Man went all in on this Quadrilogy
*Fun ball busting fact:* right at the beginning of the Converted Church map, there is a secret switch in one of the light panels that lowers all the pillars simultaneously so that you don't have to go switchunting.
*Another fun ball busting fact:* oxygen in these games lowers faster when you move or shoot, and the drop down rate gets faster in higher difficulties. Because of this, the map Acme Station is pretty much impossible in Total Carnage if you go in with anything less than a full tank and if you don't make a beeline straight to the recharge pickups without detours. By a light year of distance that is the single most difficult map in the trilogy on Total Carnage.
This series has been an absolute blast to watch! Marathon Infinity was my single favorite game as a kid, even if I couldn't even pay attention to the story back then since I didn't learn english well enough until I was around 16 years old, some 6 to 8 years after I played the games on my dad's Mac. To me it has the best maps of the trilogy, and some of the worst ones. Kinda like TNT Evilution, when it's good it's great but when it's bad it wants you dead from frustration.
I've been one of the comments-section gremlins that every once in a while jokes on Civvie's videos about "Pro Marathon when, Civvie?", and this series of reviews is everything I would have expected from such a thing, and maybe even more! The Civvie cameo in this video really got me laughing.
Thank you so much for making these reviews. Now I got a need to go frogblast some vent cores agains.
“oxygen in these games lowers faster when you move or shoot, and the drop down rate gets faster in higher difficulties.”
Ehh… almost. There’s a penalty on Total Carnage for holding down the run key in a vacuum (but not under liquids). “Always run” counts, and this applies regardless of whether you’re moving. This penalty does not apply on lower difficulty settings.
There’s also a penalty on both Total Carnage and Major Damage for holding down either the primary or secondary trigger, either under liquids or in vacuum; this applies even when you’re in between shots (or reloading).
Oxygen drain on Normal and below is always constant (in the vanilla games, at least, since nothing uses the oxygen drain attack): a full tank of oxygen will always last you for six minutes.
I’m not sure if links will get filtered, but if you go to the Aleph One GitHub’s wiki, you’ll find a page covering all the changes between difficulty settings. Note that some of these are also dependent on physics (e.g., monsters being marked Alien is independent of whether they’re hostile, so hostile Bobs don’t scale based on difficulty in Infinity).
@@MarathonVidmaster Thanks for the in-depth answer! Love your channel as well. Will be checking out the wiki, I had no idea it existed.
@@wallyhackenslacker No problem, and thanks for the kind words! And yeah, that wiki remains an inexplicably well-kept secret. It’s the only wiki for this series with consistently reliable information - but of course, that’s because only Aleph One’s developers have access to edit it. :p
@@MarathonVidmaster Indeed! It's pretty good actually. I still remember the days of the Traxus Wiki. It was nice but it's ratio of broken links to good ones was something to behold.
So ultimately if I'm not mistaken, the epiphany that Durandal comes to is that he's a creation stuck in a game, and that the reason why the player can ascend/escape the end of the universe is because they are the only person who can truly "exit" the game
Yes but also yes. Yes in a literal 4th wall breaking sense, but also yes in-universe as he is realising that as a material construct he is bound to the material universes rules, he may well master the rules of the material 'game' but cannot leave it. The player character is able to transcend the material game in some not entirely explained manner, to fates unknown. This sci fi is pointing us in a similar direction as Dune: that mastery of calculation and of material dominion will not save us, it will help us win the game of life, but it will bind us to that game and this ultimately trap us. (I'm in the rabbit hole send help)
@@DisgruntledPeasant
Wheels within wheels, plots within plots...
God is a prisoner of his powers. Shaitan approaches on the wind fast as a Coriolis storm to rend flesh from bone and blast bone to dust. Fear is the mind-killer.
I think the 4th wall breaking stuff shouldn't be interpreted as the literal text of the game but rather a theme that arises from the text. This is probably difficult to explain in English terms since English literary analysis is based on a different theory. But basically when analyzing a text we can choose to either see it as one self contained unit which is complete on its own or we can see it as a work of fiction that exists in and therefore in relation to the real world. However the latter should always arise from the former. In this case there is a completely in-universe interpretation where Durandal hasn't broken the 4th wall as the other commenter laid out. However this interpretation when taken together with the fact that this is a work of fiction leads to a theme about how storytelling works, and specifically how storytelling in video games work, the constant references to myths reinforces this interpretation. Furthermore the name Durandal also points in this direction, the AI is named after an inanimate tool despite in the fiction of the game being very active and usually driving the story forward. This acknowledges that as a fictional character Durandal remains static and can never actually change, they will only be a tool that helps the player drive the story forward, a player who is explicitly identified with the wielder of Durandal, Roland.
@@DisgruntledPeasant so I'm a YEAR late to this, but I recently finished all 6 Dune books and your comment really surprised me. I understand how Marathon's ending could be interpreted as the whole "escaping the game" thing. But Dune??!! Were you refering to Chapterhouse's ending? I need to talk to you about this, this is insane lmao
@@juan16205 I understand that my interpretation is a little on the wacky end haha.
I essentially see the entire "golden path" of Paul/Leto is one in which they calculate the optimal way to for humanity to "win".
The god kings utopia is one in which every humans life has been planned out for them in a peaceful agrarian paradise that is near identical on millions of planets.
People don't really make choices anymore even if they think they do, because everything has been pre-ordaned.
They may well be happy, but there is something suffocating about it, afterall life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
Durrandal calling you a bottom is somewhat in character. I love it
Jesus, Mandalore you've absolutely outdone yourself with this series. The writing has been spectacular. The twist of humor and lore references, I'm sure some even flew over my head despite being somewhat deep in the lore myself. Like, I feel only a handful of people can possibly understand the sheer titanic amount of work you put into this. I absolutely love this series and will most likely rewatch it several times. A review accompanied by such a cool way of story telling and amazing voice acting to top it all off.
Any amount of praise feels like an understatement. Absolute sincerest respect for the hard work of you and all the people that helped with this project.
Worded it better than I could have.
I myself am on the fifth or sixth watch-through of this entire series. It's oddly enthralling - I don't think I've ever come back to a youtube series more than I have this one.
@@thepengolem7850 old school bungie knew their shit
I know nothing about the lore. At all. It'll be fun to come back once I know a bit more and find things I didn't understand before.
That ending. Perfect. Bringing in other deep divers on YT was a stroke of madness that this video needed. Thank you.
All those youtubers also had the same cutaway gag as the first marathon video in their recent videos with different text.
Are all the different references in those videos just building to this, or does the ??? at the bottom of the credits hint to something greater still obscured.
@@azrielsatan8693 it's hamish sinclair.
?????? ????????
hamish sinclair
If only Mandy would have brought Grimbeard in
His humor would have perfectly suited that segment