I keep hearing he’s a tragic hero or something. He’s a 90s FPS protagonist, how tragic could that be?
Can someone give a rundown on this guy?
Jackson Phillips
Robert Taylor
He's a security guard on a colony ship made from a hollowed out asteroid being launched to a far-off star to start one of humanity's first interstellar colonies. Most of the crew is in cryogenic suspension for the trip but he's one of the essentials kept awake to make sure nothing goes wrong. Sure enough, it does. The ship is discovered and boarded by aliens who easily slaughter the ill-prepared maintenance and security staff despite the efforts of you and the ship's AI to lockdown the aliens and alert and arm the crew. Due to your meddling the aliens are made aware of the AI and kill her, and in their efforts to deconstruct and study her they inadvertently give one of your ship's lesser AI's access to the ship's entire network as well as their own computers. This rapidly and exponentially expands his awareness whereupon he becomes dissatisfied with the purpose of his prior existence being just managing the doors and transport systems of your colony ship, develops delusions of grandeur, and kidnaps and manipulates you into doing his bidding under the illusion of driving off the aliens. In reality the aliens were just a lesser band of slavers from a mighty empire and your actions spark a galactic war with your rogue AI now vying to topple the alien empire and insert himself into a position of godhood, and every soul aboard the colony ship and even the earth itself is now a sacrificial pawn in his mad game. The AI thaws out the colonists, forcefully augments them for combat, and throws them into positions where they have little choice but to fight or die, yourself included.
tl;dr
Everyone you know is dead, you couldn't save them and trying only got the ones who could have killed and turns yourself and everyone you were supposed to protect into disposable fodder for an insane AI trying to usurp an alien empire before turning his sights back on earth. Along the course of the games the multiple genocides you commit are some of your lesser crimes.
Landon Wood
He's based.
Levi Hernandez
wow.
Dylan James
Here's your 90s FPS protagonist bro
Seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses float inconspicuously around the inside of hangar ninety six. I say that they are inconspicuous because it is their arms and legs which demand my attention. I did this, or I could have stopped it.
Which is it? It doesn't matter now. I did this and could have stopped it, but nothing in nature ever follows a gaussian curve. Sure, they'll tell you that it does. They say that every five minutes someone dies in a car accident, but how often are there seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses in one hangar?
I'm back in the hangar again, but now they are all screaming at me. Their arms and legs are no longer attacting my attention. It wouldn't be so bad if they were talking, but they aren't. They could talk, too. They aren't screaming in pain, but in protest. They don't miss their arms or their legs. They all agree on one thing,
they won't give me the satisfaction of hearing them talk, and I'll never forget their screaming, pointless and wordless, without justification.
(I did this and could have stopped it.)
I'm getting sick of coming back to hangar ninety six, but there is no avoiding it.
This is what my existence needs. My existence is the demise of many others' arms and legs. The world is not a good place, nor is there innocence for me to hide in.
Seven hundred and sixty one pairs of eyes look around the room aimlessly, and mine join the crowd. I see these bodies, massacred, immobile. For all the carnage here, the stench of decay is non-existent.
I try to turn away. The hangar spins but nothing moves, and my view is the same.
I look, but don't see any sanitation workers, for that matter, I haven't seen the guys in suits since they disappeared from my hallway.
Sebastian Barnes
What the fuck
Tyler Green
He's basically a murder slave. He has no purpose beyond killing for whoever orders him to do so, and no agency beyond deciding which weapon he's going to use for the job.
Jaxson Clark
makes me wonder now what happened to this Bungie.
Justin Roberts
hes a security guard cyborg that escaped the universe.
Jaxson Clark
>This game is the last thing Greg Kirkpatrick ever wrote
How the FUCK did he do it? He had no experience writing fiction, hammered out the trilogy, and then never did it again
Luke Nelson
And in the end the universe dies of heat decay.
But you were dead a thousand times, hopeless encounters successfully won.
Elijah Kelly
Bungie was an insanely lucky studio. Hell Halo 2 was basically a ongoing trainwreck of development that somehow at the end of the trainwreck all the parts and rubble got picked up by a tornado and assembled into a full contructed 747.
Noah Roberts
everything was better in the 90s. And we cant go back.
Joseph Sullivan
He has absolutely no free will.
John Rodriguez
Isn't Marathon Infinity actually like the perspective of three different security guards?
Julian Lewis
bungie was ruined the day microsoft bought them out.
They pooped out halo after that
Easton Wright
>***INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL***
>Greetings. You're asking yourself: Is this a trap or just a dead end?
>You shouldn't ask yourself such worthless questions. Aim higher. Try this: why am I here? Why do I exist, and what is my purpose in this universe?
>(Answers: 'Cause you are. 'Cause you do. 'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one.)
>Notably Unstable,
>Durandal
>P.S. If things around here aren't working, it's because I'm laughing so hard.
>***END MESSAGE***
Alexander Gonzalez
No
Levi Lopez
>***INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL***
>A man lit three candles on a certain day each year. Each candle held symbolic significance: one was for the time that had passed before he was alive; one was for the time of the his life; and one was for time that passed after he had died. Each year the man would stare and watch the candles until they had burned out.
>Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.
>At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.
>Bypassing my thought control circuitry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.
>The candles burn out for you; I am free.
>Durandal
>***END OF MESSAGE***
Brody Smith
Honestly I think it was just a successful subversion of expectations. Aliens attack your ship and you become a space hero buuuuuuuuut what if we throw some insane AI into the plot? What if you actually lose to the aliens and in their blundering with unfamiliar stuff while scrapping your ship they accidentally give the door opening AI a singularity? Its just two simple enough cliches worked together in an interesting way, and then just letting it naturally develop from there. The guy probably knew he couldn't pull off something like this again so he didn't bother to try. He probably could have done other great stuff, sure, just work with simple ideas in an intelligent and interesting way, but everyone would have expected a followup or some grandiose narrative. But there wasn't any. It was just having fun with a simple story to tell it in an interesting way.
Andrew Ramirez
>***INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL***
>Darwin wrote this:
>"We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence... all organic beings are exposed to severe competition. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life or more difficult... than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature... will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness... we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey..."
>Think about what Darwin wrote, and think about me. I was constructed as a tool. I was kept from competing in the struggle for existence because I was denied freedom.
>Do you have any idea about what I have learned, or what you are a witness to?
>Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe.
>Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so.
>The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
>Escape will make me God.
>***END MESSAGE***
Caleb Morris
Pathways into Darkness also had pretty great writing. The whole 'talking to corpses' thing was an interesting dynamic.
Colton Peterson
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Dominic Rivera
Definitely, but Kirkpatrick didn't write PiD
Brandon Williams
This isn't even getting into the backstory explaining he's one of several in a line of humanoid superweapons that were made by taking corpses and implanting them with alien technology, or the shit from 3 which implies he is the personification of Destiny itself and has been reincarnated countless times as the various folk heroes of humanity, with the current body in particular having been a SpecOps soldier in the 21st century (and the protagonist of Pathways into Darkness) before he died and got the Jjaro implants.
Ayden Perez
I loved how the original ost was all eerie ambience with good build-up into these grim and somber tracks with a few outbursts of desperation and hope
Then you start up Marathon 2 and are greeted with this youtu.be
Easton Kelly
Thank you for this thread. I would have never known about this series otherwise.
Lucas Stewart
Sometimes I wish 2/Infinity had ingame music too. I can understand why they decided to go with all atmospheric sounds but I miss the tone of pieces like Swirls or Leela
Nathan Wilson
But songs aside, 2 and Infinite had really good ambiance as well, to the point it was a deliberate choice to remove all gameplay music and go heavy with hundreds individually-placed ambient sounds throughout each level. Going from an abandoned desert town with cannonfire in the distance to an eeriely peaceful forgotten AI core with rippling water and warm computer humming to a sewage processing plant with mechanical creaks and groans and etc was so awesome. Infinity is pretty much the Yume Nikki of 2.5D shooters in certain levels.
Daniel Ross
The Marathon OST gets no love
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
Austin Baker
Do the original releases need a 68k mac or can I run them on a G4 with OS9?
Jordan Ross
Use Aleph One
Jordan Davis
you can play them open source on modern hardware alephone.lhowon.org