*cough cough cough* 2472/11/17 - 4.9°S 0°E AUDIO ONLY Strauss is gone. Whole sky alight as his ship set off. I might be the last MIDA survivor on Mars. The gun detected teleports yesterday and I had to move camp. Cannot shake the fear that they will send battleroids; even this AI marvel couldn't save me. Shot the ice this morning. The gun fired a thermal round and then a pellet of water purifier. Came out pure and sweet. Marvelous. I've been reading the gun's Encyclopedia Arcana. All about the crash that became Strauss's obsession and hope. “Metastability in the salvaged construct!” Ha ha! Let's hope our ideals too can pass through grief, fury, and envy into a new freedom elsewhere. Wonder if the gun heard me when I asked to go somewhere better. Wonder why it led me here. Going to follow its compass tonight. Down below.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming In Destiny it is implied that Durandal became Rasputin, the all powerful A.I. stationed in Mars. Destiny is pretty cool if you give it a shot, not perfect, but nothing is. Though I'm a hard-core Marathon fan since the 90s, played all three games on my Macs, downloaded some awesome fan made single-player maps from the community. Those were the days… I miss it. See you in starside…
It's interesting seeing the story explained so clearly - I already knew a good chunk of this stuff since I played the game, but I didn't see most of the hidden terminals and having it all pieced together made me realize some things I didn't realize before. Like how all of the ammo is laying around because of a failed MIDA take over, I think that's one of the only time I've seen a game give a legitimate explanation as to why there's so many friggin fire arms around.
> Like how all of the ammo is laying around because of a failed MIDA take over, I think that's one of the only time I've seen a game give a legitimate explanation as to why there's so many friggin fire arms around. in my opinion, things like this are better left alone instead of trying to provide an explanation for gameplay mechanics which is inherently fourth wall breaking for example, in gta 4 it's less realistic for niko to walk around with bullet holes in him compared to gta sa where carl looked fine, the implication that he simply never got shot and him taking damage is purely a gameplay mechanic separate from story is better than acknowledging that he took 30 bullets all over his body and shrugged them off
I think the worst explanation I've seen for lots of random guns / items being in the gameplay environment was retcon'd into existence by MGSV. A weird burned up Hungarian man we've never seen up until Phantom Pain was apparently following Big Boss around on his mission in Russia in the 1960's, placing american weapons and FOX equipment all over the place in secret before the mission even begins. Explaining away why the Soviets have american m37 shotguns, Stoner belt fed Machine guns, and early prototype AR-15's, ETC. Except when MGS3 came out, the actual reason given for all of this equipment (and some of the more exotic food and animals) was that Volgin and his army had been either been stealing things from the west and the world at large, collecting items from US conflicts in asia, or straight up copying SAS tactics to the point of buying the same guns the SAS had at the time. So we go from a slightly funky "these russians are just buying / stealing a lot of technology" to... "a super secret organization that you've never heard of until the 1980's has been supplying you with weapons on all of your missions up until you left the FOXHOUND unit, despite never leaving any traces of their existence nor any references being made to them in a game series all about referencing its own secret organizations constantly." Way to over-write your story retroactively Kojima.
Solid. Never realized how well Tycho comes off in this game. I always view his terminals in the light of his behavior in the sequels. For instance, while he occasionally gets preachy about Durandal's behavior, I get the sense that his hatred of him is motivated by his own enslavement. He held Durandal responsible, and was jealous that he didn't share the same fate.
I've been playing marathon since the days of the Macintosh Quadra. I really do not understand how Bungie's does not remake this amazing game. What a waste of a legendary game.
this franchise sounds like something worthy of a remake in the same vane of the new Spyro trilogy or that crash bandacoot thing and that working progress System shock game.
DisparateBroom yes but you didn’t hear it from me.... I’m 19 years old my dad is Pete Parsons, and I know from the inside they are, it will be released late 2021 or early 2022. I will answer all the questions I can.
@@hayleypositivity7504 Unless you're able to provide both substantial and credible information beyond "My daddy is in Bungie" I doubt such a claim. No offense, but while Bungie still owns the license they have shown no interest in doing anything with it.
Mjolnir mk.4, miserriah armory, traxus, rampancy. In many ways, marathon was halo before halo with these key words and philosophies. It was a stepping stone.
The design philosophies and gameplay looks certainly influenced Halo with the ammo readout showing each individual round, the 15m motion detector, etc.
I love how people are still talking about this game. When I was around 7 or 8 years old, my dad bought me M2 for our Mac Performa. Prior to that I had never owned any FPS games and was jealous of all my friends who were playing Doom. I remember the feeling I had playing that game, this sense of experiencing something larger than life, something deeply significant. To top it all, the graphics were beautiful, weapons kicked ass and the levels were insanely detailed. 10 years later, when my English was in a much better shape, I started delving into the lore and noticed just how intricate and well-written the story was. To this day, I think the Marathon trilogy has one of the best science fiction game stories I've seen. It has this air of wonder, mystery and existential terror all wrapped up in one awe-inspiring package.
Wonderful to discover this in 2020. I was 12 when the game came out. This video is beautifully done and captures the wonder I felt at the time as a naive 12 year old. I was a huge fan in the 90s, and visited the marathon story webpage frequently well into the 2010s. The plot of Marathon was my introduction to many scientific and literary concepts and inspired me to pursue a career with NASA. I worked in and around NASA from 2010-2019 and now work in cloud computing in space. I can now see that I was just the right age when Marathon was released to internalize many of its concepts and themes and begin to form my adult worldview and goals with those themes in mind. Thanks so much for making this video series. Now that my own kids are 8 and 6 I wonder what will mesh with their growing awareness of the world and universe.
One of the things that also blew me away when I first played the Marathon series, was the secondary fire options for weapons. It's the first time that I have ever played an FPS game, where you can launch a secondary attack, like a rocket grenade, and other kickass attacks out of the same weapon. This allowed for some really cool, and fresh, variety to your arsenal!
I played through Marathon using Aleph One years ago and had the Marathon 2 release on 360. I ended up not putting much time into 2 but made I most of the way through 1 before the map design finally got the best of me. The file is on another computer, but I made it to a level with plenty of not-lava and those giant flying robots, definitely after the rebellion started. After a while I just gave up. I really should give Marathon another shot because I had a lot of fun and enjoyed it a lot, but the map design just felt mazelike to me sometimes.
That would be Try Again, which is the semi-last level. The next is Ingue Ferroque (groin sword, partly because the difficulty is a dick move and partly as it's a misprint of the Latin for By Fire and Sword) which is the final level. You were so close to the end. Thankfully, the mazelike tendencies of Marathon are usually good as the maps are easy to figure out, but some mazes do indeed get pretty bad. Kill Your Television in Marathon 2 is just plain awful and Aye Mak Sicur, the final map of Infinity is the worst of the lot. Don't get me started on why Aye Mak Sicur is bad as we'd be here all night. The mods tend to sadly be more mazelike in level design and annoying to navigate. Eternal X has its fair share, such as Unwired, Unpfhorseen, Dread Not and Deep in the Grotto. Rubicon X is the absolute worst for bad mazes on top of not being balanced for Total Carnage.
Finished the game yesterday and yeah, I agree with almost everything. I just want to add that it was not the only shooter of this narrative/objective-based type for that time. First System Shock came out in 1994, a bit earlier than Marathon, and next year Star Wars: Dark Forces, Cybermage and The Terminator: Future Shock were released.
Saw you on tfb. That was cool. I was too young to understand the plot in this game and didn't have a Mac so I just killed everything. Glad you made this and explained it after all these years.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming funny thing is I think I'm older than you by a couple years but I was more of a MechWarrior 2/mercs fan (how I found your channel. Love those vids.). I do remember marathon vividly though even got it on xbox360 arcade and still couldn't beat it. Amazing how Halo is the same game though. Everything is there. Thanks again for the plot explanation.
Way to go man. Sometimes I feel you need to critic something very harshley in order to not feel unbiased by nostalgia, but its your channel and your fav games. You dont need to convince us about how objective you are since that hasnt worked in the past for the general TH-cam masses and second because we love how much effort you put in your videos convincing us to play some pretty obscure games. Never yield man, we love and support your work.
Also from the Manual text: The Mirata lurches from its bay on the back of its powerful rocket booster. After the jolting of the separation ceases, you find yourself pondering the fate of the colony receding below you. With apprehension, the *same apprehension you felt three hundred and twenty-two years* earlier, you envision Marcus Tiberius Buendia, one of Sol's greatest leaders. "Mankind will venture out past its earthly bounds, and move into a future grander and more real than the total of its own written history." Buendia, the president of the Unified Earth Space Council, had spoken those words to the people of the Sol System on the eve of the launching of the Marathon. " *This, the grandest achievement mankind has ever conceived* will be for the purpose of peace and the preservation of the human race. May this great technological ark carry with it the sum total of all human wisdom, and may neither time nor distance weaken our common ties." 2794 - 322 = 2472 which is the year of UESC Marathon was commissioned First Coup d'Etat: 2321 - Log about said Coup: 2329 Date for the weapons stash: 2479 - Seven years after Marathon's commission The terminal at 8:24 predates the commission by 263 years - 2209; 15 years after the Battledroids incident, so you might've been there as well, in stasis, or not.
these videos are excellent. been replaying the trilogy, having some of the most fun in years. the simple yet effective music in Marathon 1 makes me wish they had Alex and his Casio crank out some more tunes for M2, but the atmospheric sounds are pretty amazing. Either way, you can't go wrong with this trilogy no matter what some two-bit nobody reviewer who shall go unnamed says.
also totally agree about Marathon fans getting up their asses about what the Security Officer is "supposed" to be. The dream stages in Infinity are called "Electric Sheep," they literally could not have made it more obvious without explicitly stating it lol.
I LOVE that you pronounce Durandal the same way me and my two brothers pronounced it when we were kids!! it’s Dur an dal not Dur RAND dal!! This made me so happy.
A channel called "Halvedstudios" made a FULL playthrough of all 3 marathons a solid long time ago. All of them, the only channel i think that has done so and NO ONE appears to even know of this channel's existence. there is a quirk with this channel, note: no videos are visible anymore technically, when you get to his channel, check "Playlists", that's the main way to find let's plays for specific games, apparently he uh.. played with his channel's physics a bit, by the looks.
i agree! I've always felt like having the terminals voice acted would really take away from their impact and it really shows here!! This Durandal guys got his lips right up on his mic!!! Rampant ASMR
I played the entire Marathon series on the Mac Quadra 840AV, the days before I moved to PC. This series simply draws you into the world of marathon especially the amazing musical soundtrack. I really don't understand how Bungie doesn't Reboot this marvelous game series, with today's technology the marathon series will be amazing.
I can’t believe 4 years after this video bungie is coming out with a new marathon game only it’s and multiplayer extraction shooter and will probably shit on the original
This is a really fantastic update to your previous examination of Marathon, and I'm glad to see a greater analysis of the story. M1 is interesting, as it has it's own style and tone compared to M2 and M:I - I'll be interested to see what you think of the subtle changes to Durandal's character between the first and second games
I first came across Marathon from a demo with three levels. I think it was on the front cover of a magazine. Played it on an LC2, with a 68020 processor so weak that I had to roll the OS back to 6.0.8 just to regain enough RAM to run it. Even then it was a postage-stamp sized game within Marathon's overly-designed UI chrome. No sound either, not enough memory to load it. Since I didn't have much money back then, I couldn't afford another game and played the Marathon demo a lot. Mars Needs Women was the level I spent most time in, and once I upgraded to a IIvx, it became actually playable at a decent size and frame rate. There was a third-party editor I got hold of and I could add in a whole bunch of Pfhor with fast respawn times to make the game an endless cycle of running and shooting. I think the huge monster (behemoth?) was in the promo pictures (and on the oddly-shaped box, when I could finally afford it) but not in the level. Fun times.
3:32 i remember playing the original Marathon 1 shareware application which came in a bundle disc demo which were popular back in the day. And if I remember correctly, the intro screen for Arrival did NOT have the LEONARDO in red font that I suppose was later added in Aleph One.
This was an excellent analysis and overview of Marathon, the presentation was on point and i was really glad to hear everyone did so well. Personally, Mav and Null did particularly well. Its very interesting going backwards and forwards through the series as the events of M1 are barely a footnote by the events of Infinity, although, its all important contextually (battleroids, Strauss) when digging into Infinity's bullshit mindbending dreams. 9/10 dead kids
Love the voice acting for the terminals. If they got voice filters, it would work even more. Durandal's is especially good. Marathon 2 and 3 actually would have had movie clips, audio tracks and camera footage ala the Build Engine to appear in terminals, but those features weren't implemented. They are still hanging around in Aleph One's code, unfinished however so someone could fully implement them for that. If that happens, the voices could be used in the games themselves with voice filters for each AI. Durandal would have a Microsoft Mike filter, Leela a GLaDOS one, and Tycho a SHODAN one.
Adding voice would dramatically change the game. It would have been interesting to see Bungie tackle voice and video, but as it is, a strong element of Marathon is stopping to read. I feel like it's better to demand the player voice these characters in their head.
@@JohnDoe-xf2ke No. While you do lose some of the benefits of text only (skimming the text for the gist), voiced is always better and makes the world feel more alive as opposed to feeling like Marcus “Marathonguy” Jones checking his Hololive twitter every 5 minutes (or Marathon Story Forum & 4chan in the case of M2 Tycho and the Pfhor respectively). It doesn’t have to be mandatory either. Look at System Shock: its audio logs were portable terminals in the Floppy disk version and the Enhanced Edition adds both the text and the audio at once. The other option is to do the Doom 4, Doom Eternal and Halo SPV3 thing and save the voiced terminals and/or cutscenes/Half Life style scripted sequences for main story beats while using traditional terminals for all the deeper background stuff. Strife also had text as subtitles in its dialog sections.
@@lionocyborg6030 Of course, and I agree. But I also think it's appropriate to acknowledge that reading puts a person into a different mindset than listening to dialogue, and lack of audio performance leaves a lot more to the imagination. There's value in that too.
@@JohnDoe-xf2ke that is true. It’s the difference between the novel or manga/comic original Vs the movie or TV show version e.g. Stormbreaker, Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, Percy Jackson, 2001 or Tekwar.
For those wondering about why there was never any sequel or remaster or anything, well the truth is "Halo" is the spiritual successor. You can't deny they're very close games for more than one reason, not just that they're both story driven sci fi action shooters.
Obviously they’re separate universes and therefore don’t exactly fit together neatly, but it’s kind of cool how the bungie games share enough aspects that you could kind of put Marathon, halo, and bungie together as a loosely fitting story that makes sense in that order.
At one point in Halo's development Master Chief and the security officer were actually going to be the same character. I'm not sure at what point it was scrapped.
The only Marathon game I played was Durandal on XBLA and I didn't like it. I'll save it for that video, but one thing I'll ask here is if it was a step down in terms of level design?
All 3 games are confusing first time as 90s FPS tend to, but durandal in particular has the least good levels of the 3 for sure. They're pretty boring later on in comparison to 1 and infinity.
M2 has a focus on bigger levels with bigger battles and more exploration. My experience has been that M2 seems the best on a first playthrough, but upon replaying them it's a little dull.
@@Demetrius900000 Durandal will cease to exist when the hardware capable of supporting him ceases to exist. In the case of the Big Rip, IIRC, dark energy will eventually cause the atoms composing everything to overcome the forces holding them together and disintegrate into nothing.
@@KoboFox Funny how things work. System Shock devs are now making Deus Ex sequels and expanding SS with a sequel and prequel, (and whatever Levine's working on) and Bungie are making HALO and Destiny. That's one team that specialised in shooters around one solid franchise, and another that went into rpg/fps under all sorts of names.
@@KoboFox On top of that, Ken Levine is a Marathon fan too, so he referenced it in System Shock 2, and Bioshock Infinite is a love letter to Marathon Infinity in Bioshock form, and I don't just mean the name.
Ive played Marathon on and off the past decade though i grew up with Doom. I like the gameplay but find the maps much emptier with less architecture than its contemporaries and textures quite dull especially compared to Doom. I wish Bungie would've followed one John Romero's holy map design rule: Use border textures between 2 different wall/floor textures, or else it just looks, a bit off.
*cough cough cough*
2472/11/17 - 4.9°S 0°E
AUDIO ONLY
Strauss is gone. Whole sky alight as his ship set off. I might be the last MIDA survivor on Mars. The gun detected teleports yesterday and I had to move camp. Cannot shake the fear that they will send battleroids; even this AI marvel couldn't save me.
Shot the ice this morning. The gun fired a thermal round and then a pellet of water purifier. Came out pure and sweet. Marvelous. I've been reading the gun's Encyclopedia Arcana. All about the crash that became Strauss's obsession and hope. “Metastability in the salvaged construct!” Ha ha! Let's hope our ideals too can pass through grief, fury, and envy into a new freedom elsewhere.
Wonder if the gun heard me when I asked to go somewhere better. Wonder why it led me here. Going to follow its compass tonight. Down below.
Destiny fucking sucks.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming
Didnt they.try and the "you are destiny " thing in the recent trials of the nine?
Bungie should lay off the smack and microtransactions.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming In Destiny it is implied that Durandal became Rasputin, the all powerful A.I. stationed in Mars.
Destiny is pretty cool if you give it a shot, not perfect, but nothing is.
Though I'm a hard-core Marathon fan since the 90s, played all three games on my Macs, downloaded some awesome fan made single-player maps from the community. Those were the days… I miss it.
See you in starside…
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming Destiny is fucking great. It's story is even better than Marathon's.
It's interesting seeing the story explained so clearly - I already knew a good chunk of this stuff since I played the game, but I didn't see most of the hidden terminals and having it all pieced together made me realize some things I didn't realize before. Like how all of the ammo is laying around because of a failed MIDA take over, I think that's one of the only time I've seen a game give a legitimate explanation as to why there's so many friggin fire arms around.
> Like how all of the ammo is laying around because of a failed MIDA take over, I think that's one of the only time I've seen a game give a legitimate explanation as to why there's so many friggin fire arms around.
in my opinion, things like this are better left alone instead of trying to provide an explanation for gameplay mechanics which is inherently fourth wall breaking
for example, in gta 4 it's less realistic for niko to walk around with bullet holes in him compared to gta sa where carl looked fine, the implication that he simply never got shot and him taking damage is purely a gameplay mechanic separate from story is better than acknowledging that he took 30 bullets all over his body and shrugged them off
I'm questioning whether Half-Life has a justification for all the guns lying around. HL2 is open and shut, though.
I think the worst explanation I've seen for lots of random guns / items being in the gameplay environment was retcon'd into existence by MGSV.
A weird burned up Hungarian man we've never seen up until Phantom Pain was apparently following Big Boss around on his mission in Russia in the 1960's, placing american weapons and FOX equipment all over the place in secret before the mission even begins. Explaining away why the Soviets have american m37 shotguns, Stoner belt fed Machine guns, and early prototype AR-15's, ETC.
Except when MGS3 came out, the actual reason given for all of this equipment (and some of the more exotic food and animals) was that Volgin and his army had been either been stealing things from the west and the world at large, collecting items from US conflicts in asia, or straight up copying SAS tactics to the point of buying the same guns the SAS had at the time.
So we go from a slightly funky "these russians are just buying / stealing a lot of technology" to...
"a super secret organization that you've never heard of until the 1980's has been supplying you with weapons on all of your missions up until you left the FOXHOUND unit, despite never leaving any traces of their existence nor any references being made to them in a game series all about referencing its own secret organizations constantly."
Way to over-write your story retroactively Kojima.
Im here just because Bungies recent announcement. Im so hype! 🤩🤩🤩🤩
Gotta refresh my memory given the news from the other day. We're back, babyyyyyyyy - Marathon 202x around the corner.
Solid. Never realized how well Tycho comes off in this game. I always view his terminals in the light of his behavior in the sequels. For instance, while he occasionally gets preachy about Durandal's behavior, I get the sense that his hatred of him is motivated by his own enslavement. He held Durandal responsible, and was jealous that he didn't share the same fate.
Marathon has a great soundtrack
It's so atmospheric imo
I've been playing marathon since the days of the Macintosh Quadra.
I really do not understand how Bungie's does not remake this amazing game.
What a waste of a legendary game.
Probably licensing issues. Who owns the franchise? Apple? Bungie? Now that Bungie has been under Microsoft, do they own the license? It's complicated.
Willian Gabriel Bungie owns the Marathon IP.
@@williancruz9657 Bungie is no longer under Micro$oft.
uri bak oh they will. Maybe... and I mean they recently posted a picture and sent to a bunch of fans reimagined marathon logos. Possibility is high.
What do you think Halo was?
Mandaloregaming just uploaded a video about Marathon and I remembered that this video made me play the games back in the day.
Good memories.
this franchise sounds like something worthy of a remake in the same vane of the new Spyro trilogy or that crash bandacoot thing and that working progress System shock game.
I'm just here for the post-trailer hype. I know we aren't ever getting M4 but I've wanted a modern marathon reboot since Doom got one.
This year is the 25th anniversary of a forgotten masterpiece.
Bungie should do a remake of marathon
DisparateBroom they are
Hayley Positivity they are?
DisparateBroom yes but you didn’t hear it from me.... I’m 19 years old my dad is Pete Parsons, and I know from the inside they are, it will be released late 2021 or early 2022. I will answer all the questions I can.
@@hayleypositivity7504
Unless you're able to provide both substantial and credible information beyond "My daddy is in Bungie" I doubt such a claim. No offense, but while Bungie still owns the license they have shown no interest in doing anything with it.
Mjolnir mk.4, miserriah armory, traxus, rampancy. In many ways, marathon was halo before halo with these key words and philosophies. It was a stepping stone.
dont forget the SPNKR and Hunters
The design philosophies and gameplay looks certainly influenced Halo with the ammo readout showing each individual round, the 15m motion detector, etc.
I love how people are still talking about this game. When I was around 7 or 8 years old, my dad bought me M2 for our Mac Performa. Prior to that I had never owned any FPS games and was jealous of all my friends who were playing Doom. I remember the feeling I had playing that game, this sense of experiencing something larger than life, something deeply significant. To top it all, the graphics were beautiful, weapons kicked ass and the levels were insanely detailed.
10 years later, when my English was in a much better shape, I started delving into the lore and noticed just how intricate and well-written the story was. To this day, I think the Marathon trilogy has one of the best science fiction game stories I've seen. It has this air of wonder, mystery and existential terror all wrapped up in one awe-inspiring package.
"Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting..."
Daedalus 000 that quote still gives me chills
Wonderful to discover this in 2020. I was 12 when the game came out. This video is beautifully done and captures the wonder I felt at the time as a naive 12 year old. I was a huge fan in the 90s, and visited the marathon story webpage frequently well into the 2010s. The plot of Marathon was my introduction to many scientific and literary concepts and inspired me to pursue a career with NASA. I worked in and around NASA from 2010-2019 and now work in cloud computing in space. I can now see that I was just the right age when Marathon was released to internalize many of its concepts and themes and begin to form my adult worldview and goals with those themes in mind. Thanks so much for making this video series. Now that my own kids are 8 and 6 I wonder what will mesh with their growing awareness of the world and universe.
I was still shitting my diapers.
A Marathon future is actually quite plausible
You were so right
One of the things that also blew me away when I first played the Marathon series, was the secondary fire options for weapons. It's the first time that I have ever played an FPS game, where you can launch a secondary attack, like a rocket grenade, and other kickass attacks out of the same weapon. This allowed for some really cool, and fresh, variety to your arsenal!
I played through Marathon using Aleph One years ago and had the Marathon 2 release on 360. I ended up not putting much time into 2 but made I most of the way through 1 before the map design finally got the best of me. The file is on another computer, but I made it to a level with plenty of not-lava and those giant flying robots, definitely after the rebellion started. After a while I just gave up. I really should give Marathon another shot because I had a lot of fun and enjoyed it a lot, but the map design just felt mazelike to me sometimes.
That would be Try Again, which is the semi-last level. The next is Ingue Ferroque (groin sword, partly because the difficulty is a dick move and partly as it's a misprint of the Latin for By Fire and Sword) which is the final level. You were so close to the end. Thankfully, the mazelike tendencies of Marathon are usually good as the maps are easy to figure out, but some mazes do indeed get pretty bad. Kill Your Television in Marathon 2 is just plain awful and Aye Mak Sicur, the final map of Infinity is the worst of the lot. Don't get me started on why Aye Mak Sicur is bad as we'd be here all night.
The mods tend to sadly be more mazelike in level design and annoying to navigate. Eternal X has its fair share, such as Unwired, Unpfhorseen, Dread Not and Deep in the Grotto. Rubicon X is the absolute worst for bad mazes on top of not being balanced for Total Carnage.
I still have the original games in the box. I have fond memories of playing the Marathon series.
IT'S COMING BACK!
Finished the game yesterday and yeah, I agree with almost everything. I just want to add that it was not the only shooter of this narrative/objective-based type for that time. First System Shock came out in 1994, a bit earlier than Marathon, and next year Star Wars: Dark Forces, Cybermage and The Terminator: Future Shock were released.
This sounds a million times better than the extraction shooter live service bullshit Bungie have just announced.
Saw you on tfb. That was cool. I was too young to understand the plot in this game and didn't have a Mac so I just killed everything. Glad you made this and explained it after all these years.
AHA we'll get into this more later, but "skipping the story and just killing everything" is a major plot point in Infinity. :)
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming funny thing is I think I'm older than you by a couple years but I was more of a MechWarrior 2/mercs fan (how I found your channel. Love those vids.). I do remember marathon vividly though even got it on xbox360 arcade and still couldn't beat it. Amazing how Halo is the same game though. Everything is there. Thanks again for the plot explanation.
Way to go man. Sometimes I feel you need to critic something very harshley in order to not feel unbiased by nostalgia, but its your channel and your fav games. You dont need to convince us about how objective you are since that hasnt worked in the past for the general TH-cam masses and second because we love how much effort you put in your videos convincing us to play some pretty obscure games. Never yield man, we love and support your work.
Also from the Manual text:
The Mirata lurches from its bay on the back of its powerful rocket booster. After the jolting of the separation ceases, you find yourself pondering the fate of the colony receding below you. With apprehension, the *same apprehension you felt three hundred and twenty-two years* earlier, you envision Marcus Tiberius Buendia, one of Sol's greatest leaders. "Mankind will venture out past its earthly bounds, and move into a future grander and more real than the total of its own written history." Buendia, the president of the Unified Earth Space Council, had spoken those words to the people of the Sol System on the eve of the launching of the Marathon. " *This, the grandest achievement mankind has ever conceived* will be for the purpose of peace and the preservation of the human race. May this great technological ark carry with it the sum total of all human wisdom, and may neither time nor distance weaken our common ties."
2794 - 322 = 2472 which is the year of UESC Marathon was commissioned
First Coup d'Etat: 2321 - Log about said Coup: 2329
Date for the weapons stash: 2479 - Seven years after Marathon's commission
The terminal at 8:24 predates the commission by 263 years - 2209; 15 years after the Battledroids incident, so you might've been there as well, in stasis, or not.
The text dumps remind me a little of the first Unreal.
Indeed, text based storytelling is a far better way to convey a detailed plot - as a movie could never compare to a book for integer plot points.
Indeed. While I played Unreal first, I think of Unreal as the Marathon to Quake's Doom.
these videos are excellent. been replaying the trilogy, having some of the most fun in years. the simple yet effective music in Marathon 1 makes me wish they had Alex and his Casio crank out some more tunes for M2, but the atmospheric sounds are pretty amazing. Either way, you can't go wrong with this trilogy no matter what some two-bit nobody reviewer who shall go unnamed says.
also totally agree about Marathon fans getting up their asses about what the Security Officer is "supposed" to be. The dream stages in Infinity are called "Electric Sheep," they literally could not have made it more obvious without explicitly stating it lol.
I just finished Marathon 1 (again) and started Durandal (again) TODAY. Minutes ago. Finding your brand new video now is nuts. I Fucking love this game
I LOVE that you pronounce Durandal the same way me and my two brothers pronounced it when we were kids!! it’s Dur an dal not Dur RAND dal!! This made me so happy.
A channel called "Halvedstudios" made a FULL playthrough of all 3 marathons a solid long time ago.
All of them, the only channel i think that has done so and NO ONE appears to even know of this channel's existence.
there is a quirk with this channel, note: no videos are visible anymore technically, when you get to his channel, check "Playlists", that's the main way to find let's plays for specific games, apparently he uh.. played with his channel's physics a bit, by the looks.
Found the channel, but the playlist is gone. :|
Honestly I’d prefer if you just quoted the terminal text yourself, but it’s not up to me. Nice job.
i agree! I've always felt like having the terminals voice acted would really take away from their impact and it really shows here!! This Durandal guys got his lips right up on his mic!!! Rampant ASMR
In my head, Durandal is voiced by Anthony Hopkins, so nothing else really measures up.
its so fuckin cringe i had to mute it
Yeh nah I like it
god , Marathon ...
such a classic game, severely underrated. It's been a while since I've played the _Aleph One_ versions, too
I played the entire Marathon series on the Mac Quadra 840AV, the days before I moved to PC.
This series simply draws you into the world of marathon especially the amazing musical soundtrack.
I really don't understand how Bungie doesn't Reboot this marvelous game series, with today's technology the marathon series will be amazing.
I can’t believe 4 years after this video bungie is coming out with a new marathon game only it’s and multiplayer extraction shooter and will probably shit on the original
Can I just say I LOVE Mav's performance as Durandal? He really captures the mad narcissism that Duran has going on, it's _GREAT._
You should really play Pathways into Darkness. Fans created an Aleph One port of it, for every system!
MyNameIsOzymandias That's awesome! Where do I find this port?
Simplici7y, the marathon mod site.
I've played it a bit on my old Outrigger Mac, but have been meaning to run through all the way now that the port is done.
This is a really fantastic update to your previous examination of Marathon, and I'm glad to see a greater analysis of the story. M1 is interesting, as it has it's own style and tone compared to M2 and M:I - I'll be interested to see what you think of the subtle changes to Durandal's character between the first and second games
Love these games! I'm working on the full play throughs on all of them right now.
Amazing episode! Glad to see more videos from you.
The fact that this is not Psy Ops is downright criminal.
I first came across Marathon from a demo with three levels. I think it was on the front cover of a magazine. Played it on an LC2, with a 68020 processor so weak that I had to roll the OS back to 6.0.8 just to regain enough RAM to run it. Even then it was a postage-stamp sized game within Marathon's overly-designed UI chrome. No sound either, not enough memory to load it. Since I didn't have much money back then, I couldn't afford another game and played the Marathon demo a lot.
Mars Needs Women was the level I spent most time in, and once I upgraded to a IIvx, it became actually playable at a decent size and frame rate. There was a third-party editor I got hold of and I could add in a whole bunch of Pfhor with fast respawn times to make the game an endless cycle of running and shooting. I think the huge monster (behemoth?) was in the promo pictures (and on the oddly-shaped box, when I could finally afford it) but not in the level.
Fun times.
3:32 i remember playing the original Marathon 1 shareware application which came in a bundle disc demo which were popular back in the day. And if I remember correctly, the intro screen for Arrival did NOT have the LEONARDO in red font that I suppose was later added in Aleph One.
You did a great job with these videos. Pity the algo didn’t love it.
I lost count of how many videos of yours inspired me to track down and play various games I knew little to nothing about. Thanks again.
Your videos are great. With new marathon coming out, have you thought about doing more videos?
I hope for a remake
anyone here from the new trailer?
Ahaha yeap😂
Aha, im here after New teaser
More please! Such a big Marathon fan!
This was an excellent analysis and overview of Marathon, the presentation was on point and i was really glad to hear everyone did so well. Personally, Mav and Null did particularly well. Its very interesting going backwards and forwards through the series as the events of M1 are barely a footnote by the events of Infinity, although, its all important contextually (battleroids, Strauss) when digging into Infinity's bullshit mindbending dreams.
9/10 dead kids
Marathon Infinity is decent
Nice to hear Salokin in the vid
Good, I just played though the games a few days ago.
Love the voice acting for the terminals. If they got voice filters, it would work even more. Durandal's is especially good. Marathon 2 and 3 actually would have had movie clips, audio tracks and camera footage ala the Build Engine to appear in terminals, but those features weren't implemented. They are still hanging around in Aleph One's code, unfinished however so someone could fully implement them for that. If that happens, the voices could be used in the games themselves with voice filters for each AI. Durandal would have a Microsoft Mike filter, Leela a GLaDOS one, and Tycho a SHODAN one.
Adding voice would dramatically change the game. It would have been interesting to see Bungie tackle voice and video, but as it is, a strong element of Marathon is stopping to read. I feel like it's better to demand the player voice these characters in their head.
@@JohnDoe-xf2ke No. While you do lose some of the benefits of text only (skimming the text for the gist), voiced is always better and makes the world feel more alive as opposed to feeling like Marcus “Marathonguy” Jones checking his Hololive twitter every 5 minutes (or Marathon Story Forum & 4chan in the case of M2 Tycho and the Pfhor respectively).
It doesn’t have to be mandatory either. Look at System Shock: its audio logs were portable terminals in the Floppy disk version and the Enhanced Edition adds both the text and the audio at once. The other option is to do the Doom 4, Doom Eternal and Halo SPV3 thing and save the voiced terminals and/or cutscenes/Half Life style scripted sequences for main story beats while using traditional terminals for all the deeper background stuff. Strife also had text as subtitles in its dialog sections.
@@lionocyborg6030 Of course, and I agree. But I also think it's appropriate to acknowledge that reading puts a person into a different mindset than listening to dialogue, and lack of audio performance leaves a lot more to the imagination. There's value in that too.
@@JohnDoe-xf2ke that is true. It’s the difference between the novel or manga/comic original Vs the movie or TV show version e.g. Stormbreaker, Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, Percy Jackson, 2001 or Tekwar.
It whips so hard that you still make videos
Very cool video. Thank you for the work!
Thank you for showing off Retro Doom, just tired it and it's great.
every elog vid is christmas come early
You've diminished in size since we last spoke, mini.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming fuck how did he know
he's catching on,
_SHUT IT DOWN!_
I get enormous OCD from you not punching the green fighters
Punching is boring.
We won.
You fuckin' beut. This made me go back and play Marathon for the first time in decades. Good shit. More plz.
Frog blast the vent core!
Claudio Freitas I AM A COWARDLY FOOL
Now I absolutely see that Halo series was a complete, 3D rehash with some newer plot elements and twists.
I'd love to play a remake of the game.
I thought the story to Doom was "Demons are allergic to shotguns"
And chainsaws. And rockets. And microwaving the blood with the BFG.
my god i just got to this video from your last trilogy video from 6 years ago. your voice changed A LOT! lol
Used to play this game high as fuck at night in high school.. Unforgettable experience
Destiny is just chock full of references... wow. Shoulda looked into marathon decades ago.
Oh this is so much greater that I watched it!
The king has returned!
For those wondering about why there was never any sequel or remaster or anything, well the truth is "Halo" is the spiritual successor. You can't deny they're very close games for more than one reason, not just that they're both story driven sci fi action shooters.
So wait, Mjolnir Cyborgs. So Spartans?
Glad to know I'm not the only one who likes Marathon (a lot) more than Doom.
Obviously they’re separate universes and therefore don’t exactly fit together neatly, but it’s kind of cool how the bungie games share enough aspects that you could kind of put Marathon, halo, and bungie together as a loosely fitting story that makes sense in that order.
Motion Sickness The Game, great video as always.
If it's any consolation, there is a 3D port to the Unreal engine and the upcoming Paths of Jjaro remake
@@RandemFellow oh, i'll check the unreal port, i didn't know about it, cheers mate.
There's an FOV increase mod on Simplici7y.
@@ZapWires Hey, i tried the mod, it makes the game a lot better for me, thanks mate.
You're welcome.
I was thinking “man this guy sounds just like Hop!” 😂 great video man
I’ve been waiting for this. Love your content Roland.
You can tell marathon is the reason Halo exists.
This was exactly what I was looking for
Halo security helmet looks like the security guard's helmet here, cool.
At one point in Halo's development Master Chief and the security officer were actually going to be the same character. I'm not sure at what point it was scrapped.
I thank you for making a video of marathon in 2019, this something really good
Anyone else here after hearing Bungie is looking to revive the series?!
This was one of those games I never completed same with its sequels
0:32 all my english class taught us was shakespear, an inspector calls and poetry ;_;
i wish we had half life for an english class that would be great
The whole mida thing is referenced in Destiny 1 and 2.
It was fun being part of this, fantastic work!
Bungie! You are sitting on a gold mine! Remake Marathon!
Thank you for these videos of Marathon. It's one of, if not the best FPS Trilogy every created. Period.
The only Marathon game I played was Durandal on XBLA and I didn't like it. I'll save it for that video, but one thing I'll ask here is if it was a step down in terms of level design?
All 3 games are confusing first time as 90s FPS tend to, but durandal in particular has the least good levels of the 3 for sure. They're pretty boring later on in comparison to 1 and infinity.
M2 has a focus on bigger levels with bigger battles and more exploration. My experience has been that M2 seems the best on a first playthrough, but upon replaying them it's a little dull.
Dude I just found out you're on TFB. Congratulations!
Thought my phone glitched when I saw this video pop up.
Now you make me want to play Marathon again.
If you don't mind me asking, any room for other voice overs for future Marathon videos?
Possibly, I recruited the voices from the discord.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGamingNoice, how often are you guys on the Discord? I joined as bugga017 a while back but I'm never really on.
@@Bugga451 It's pretty active lately.
@@TheExaminedLifeofGaming I'll have to stop lurking one of these days and get my sorry butt in there.
Durandal would be happy to know that universe is actually expanding!
He’d still be around for the heat death or Big Rip, so that’s not comforting at all to him.
@@Brawler_1337 But at least it won't cause him to cease to exist, which is his fear.
@@Demetrius900000 Durandal will cease to exist when the hardware capable of supporting him ceases to exist. In the case of the Big Rip, IIRC, dark energy will eventually cause the atoms composing everything to overcome the forces holding them together and disintegrate into nothing.
@@Brawler_1337 Ooooh, good point. Now I just need to remember what the heck happened in Infinity ending and if Durandal was successful in his quest.
@@Demetrius900000 Durandal-Thoth stopped pursuing immortality and accepted their inevitable end.
Huh, this reminds me a lot of the first System Shock.
Interestingly enough, both games were released around the same time.
@@KoboFox Funny how things work. System Shock devs are now making Deus Ex sequels and expanding SS with a sequel and prequel, (and whatever Levine's working on) and Bungie are making HALO and Destiny. That's one team that specialised in shooters around one solid franchise, and another that went into rpg/fps under all sorts of names.
@@KoboFox On top of that, Ken Levine is a Marathon fan too, so he referenced it in System Shock 2, and Bioshock Infinite is a love letter to Marathon Infinity in Bioshock form, and I don't just mean the name.
3:59 shoutout!
Destiny"s story telling style makes a lot more sense now
Ive played Marathon on and off the past decade though i grew up with Doom.
I like the gameplay but find the maps much emptier with less architecture than its contemporaries and textures quite dull especially compared to Doom.
I wish Bungie would've followed one John Romero's holy map design rule: Use border textures between 2 different wall/floor textures, or else it just looks, a bit off.
10:17
TRAXUS KRAXUS
Where does this and the one from WGHF on the msp come from!?
I like how Terminals translated to Halo
MARATHON PHOENIX MASTERPIECE
Damn I wasnt chose but that is okay I was expecting that