The Marathon series has plenty of story depth that may not be immediately apparent to players. Here are some examples.
(Fridge material for fan games has been moved to Fridge.Marathon Expanded Universe.)
- Why did Durandal turn down godhood? He doesn't want to be alone. Sure, he'd be a god, powerful enough to reshape his new universe, and able to do anything, but he would be alone. Also, he would know everything. He wants to know everything, but once he reaches that goal, he'd have no purpose. He would be lonely and unable to learn. That is a Fate Worse than Death.
- In Infinity, the W'rkncacnter affects all the timelines. By preventing its release in one timeline, the player did it for all of them.
- Infinity, such as the chapters after the Prologue being: Despair, Rage, and Envy, and the final level being Aye Mak Sicur.
- The amount of detail that went into the plot sometimes is just staggering. Here (massive spoilers)
is a good example of something that does not make the slightest bit of sense when you first play Infinity, but players have puzzled out what the developers were thinking when they developed the game and come up with explanations that make perfect sense. This is one of only dozens of examples, as well. - You can dual-wield shotguns—a feat that, in real life, would snap your arms like twigs unless you were a battleroid.
- In Infinity and in Durandal we find out that the W'rkncacnter are not threatening when trapped in their prisons; however, all of their prisons (black holes, storms, stars, etc.) are temporary at best, meaning they would eventually get out, and having no way to kill them adds to the fear factor.
- To be fair by the time Black Holes evaporate through Hawking Radiation the universe will be in a state of extreme entropy and on the verge of heat death, so unleashing an Eldritch Abomination of pure chaos wouldn't change much. Not such comfort for the stars though...
- This one goes hand in hand with And I Must Scream. It turns out that Pathways into Darkness and Marathon are in the same universe, and in that universe, when you die you are forever stuck in your body for the rest of eternity, or it is implied.
- It's possible you only get an And I Must Scream scenario if you die in the vicinity of a W'rkncacnter, like in the Yucatan pyramid.
- The cyborg tanks in the second and third games are confirmed by Word of God to be created from captured humans. When one thinks about the fact that the Pfhor are slavers and have thousands of years of history, one considers that they have probably done something similar to all of the races they've enslaved. There is also a theory that the "assimilated BoBs" - which look human, run up to you, and explode - might actually be captured humans as well, but the game says they're artificial constructs (however, whether this is actually the case is open to interpretation, as the games flip-flop a bit on this point). Either way they're a pretty strong source of Fridge Horror as well.
- Tycho's personality notably does a complete one-eighty between the first game (where he demands justice for the colonists that Durandal's actions have endangered) and the next two (where he is...much less concerned with that, among other things). Obviously, going Rampant had a lot to do with that, but in one of his few terminals in M1, he informs Durandal that the S'pht rebuilt him in Durandal's image. Tycho has this habit of trying too hard to be poetic, but assuming that he was speaking literally here, well—as was asked in this longer discussion on his character: to what extent is Tycho still himself? How much of him was remodeled/discarded to emulate Durandal in his unstable Anger stage, and how much is a complete mess from incompatibility?
- A fairly big one from M2: Durandal spends a little over a month trapped in a containment unit within the Battle Group that sank Boomer. A containment unit of his vindictive, dubiously-stable younger brother's design, that said brother presumably has full access to. You'd think that Durandal, when he finally escapes and reunites with the Security Officer, would be eager to tell him all the sordid little details of his victory over Tycho—but he leaves it at "Tycho was a fool". What the hell did Tycho do to him in that time that Durandal apparently doesn't want to talk about?
- Humanity and the Pfhor are really not so different in some ways. Beyond our own sordid history enslaving our own species, Bernhard Strauss effectively created the A.I.s to be humanity's sentient servants, and his treatment of them is strongly implied to resemble Parental Abuse. The game, of course, explicitly condemns the Pfhor for owning other sentient races as slaves - but the S'pht themselves are an artificial race. The Pfhor didn't create them themselves, but the comparison can still be drawn. Moreover, it's shown in the second game that Tycho bears some massive scars from his time serving humanity, arguably pushing him into Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds territory. The games often take Black-and-Grey Morality to some very dark places.
