Shout Out / Marathon

Bungie's Marathon series is full of Shout-Outs, particularly its level names, which are loaded with shout-outs... and bad Pfhor puns. Sometimes both at once. A complete discussion of level names can be found here. However, some of the most noteworthy shout-outs in the series are these:

Marathon Solo Maps

• "Never Burn Money": probably a reference to "The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid", a case of Exactly What It Says on the Tin: the electronic music duo The KLF burned a million pounds sterling.^note According to the band members, only about £900,000 actually burned; the rest flew up the chimney. This occurred in August 1994, so the reference would have been quite topical at the time. The band members later expressed regret for having done it.
• "Couch Fishing": First of several level names referring to Beavis And Butthead. Season three's third episode is called "Couch-Fishing" (IMDb page, Fandom page).
• "Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken": "Smells Like Napalm" is a reference to Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Harrison Ford, and Dennis Hopper, and loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The Ax-Crazy Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore says:

  Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' body. The smell, you know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill smelled like victory.

  • "Tastes like chicken" is, well, a Stock Phrase, though in this case it probably also doubles as another Beavis And Butthead reference. In the episode "The Butt-head Experience" (IMDb page, Fandom page), the titular duo lick frogs as a way to get high. Beavis' opinion is, "It tastes like chicken."
• "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!" is yet another Beavis And Butthead reference, referring to Beavis' pyromania; he would typically chant "Fire, fire, fire" repeatedly when something burned.
• "Pfhor Your Eyes Only": Corrupted version of the James Bond short story collection For Your Eyes Only (1960) by Ian Fleming, whose second and fourth stories were filmed with the same name in 1981 (starring Roger Moore as Bond, directed by John Glen).

Marathon Net Maps

• "Mars Needs Women": a reference to a 1967 B-Movie directed by Larry Buchanan and starring Tommy Kirk, Yvonne Craig, and Byron Lord. The film serves as a trope name.
• "Waldo World Arena": Reference to Martin Handford's Where's Wally? series of books, known in the U.S. (where the games were produced) as Where's Waldo? The idea was that once enough bodies piled up, finding living players would be like finding Waldo.
• "You Don't Need to See My ID": Slightly paraphrased quote from a famous interaction between Obi-Wan Kenobi and a Stormtrooper in the Star Wars film A New Hope (1977, directed by George Lucas), which serves as the franchise's first depiction (in release chronology) of the Jedi Mind Trick.

  TD-110: Let me see your identification.
  Obi-Wan: You don't need to see his identification.
  TD-110: We don't need to see his identification.
  Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
  TD-110: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
  Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
  TD-110: You can go about your business.
  Obi-Wan: Move along.
  TD-110: Move along. Move along.

  • Interestingly, this level was something of a secret - it didn't show up on the command-option-new game start in the vanilla game. This may have been why Bungie used the Star Wars reference.

Marathon 2 Solo Levels

• "Waterloo Waterpark": Reference to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989, directed by Stephen Herek, starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and George Carlin).
• "The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune": Part of the title character's most famous soliloquy from William Shakespeare's Hamlet (ca. 1600), Act 3, Scene 1, in which the title character contemplates suicide:

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:
  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
  Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
  And by opposing, end them

• "What About Bob?": Name of a 1991 comedy film directed by Frank Oz and starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss.
• "Curiouser and Curiouser": Quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), uttered by the title character as things were getting curiouser and curiouser (in the now slightly archaic sense of "weirder").
• "The Hard Stuff Rules...": Yet another Beavis And Butthead reference.
• "If I Had a Rocket Launcher, I'd Make Somebody Pay": A reference to the Protest Song "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" (YouTube video; Wikipedia article) by Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn from his 1984 album Stealing Fire. The song is a response to the Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico and is his first overtly political song; he despairs waiting for a political solution and expresses the wish to take matters into his own hands. The song's chorus begins with the title repeated three times, but its ending changes each time it is sung: the first time, it ends, "I'd make somebody pay;" the second, it ends, "I would retaliate;" the third, it ends, "I would not hesitate."
• "Sorry Don't Make It So": A combination of two phrases ("'Maybe' don't make it so" and "'Sorry' don't fix things") from The Coen Brothers' 1990 neo-noir film Miller's Crossing. Not the only Miller's Crossing reference in the game; see below.
• "Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!": a quote from Marvin the Martian in the Looney Tunes short "Mad as a Mars Hare" (1963, dir. Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble). After Marvin threatens to make Bugs into a slave, Bugs pleads that he doesn't have any experience as a slave, to which Marvin responds with the level title. Naturally, Hilarity Ensues when things don't quite go as Marvin plans.
• "My Own Private Thermopylae": Although "My Own Private Idaho" was also the name of a 1991 film, Matt Soell confirms that Greg Kirkpatrick probably named it after The B-52s song "Private Idaho" (YouTube video; Wikipedia article. The film is itself Titled After the Song.) It is also a reference to the historical Battle of Thermopylae.
• "Where the Twist Flops": A direct quote from Miller's Crossing (see "Sorry Don't Make It So" above). In one scene, the character Eddie Dane says, "Shut up. Get lost. I'll see where the twist flops." Twist is period slang meaning woman and flop means domicile.
• "Feel the Noise": a reference to the song "Cum On Feel the Noize" by Slade (1973), and Covered Up by Quiet Riot (1983).
• "All Roads Lead to Sol...": A reference to an old saying, "All roads lead to Rome" because the Roman empire would build roads as they expanded the empire. However, it's also likely intended as a reference to Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in which the phrase "All roads lead to Trantor" serves as Arc Words. Asimov explicitly patterned the Foundation series after the fall of the Roman empire IN SPACE!, with Trantor as the stand-in for Rome.

Marathon 2 Net Maps

• "Thunderdome": Comes from the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie, the third entry in the film series and the last to star Mel Gibson as Max. The Thunderdome is an arena for steel-cage jousting and is accompanied by the famous phrase, "Two men enter; one man leaves." Three guesses as to what form this level takes.
• "Shangri-La": Appears to originate in James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (1933). It comes from the Tibetan language (written in Tibetan as ཞངརིལ, meaning "Shang Mountain Pass", where Shang is a district of Ü-Tsang in Tibet, north of Tashilhunpo) and is commonly used to represent an earthly paradise.
• "No Disintegrations": A quote from Darth Vader in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (1980). He is speaking to the Bounty Hunter Boba Fett in a sense that implies he has done this before.

  Darth Vader: There will be a substantial reward for the one who finds the Millennium Falcon. You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive. No disintegrations.

• "OK, Honeybunny": quote from film Pulp Fiction (1994), directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and Uma Thurman, among others. Honey Bunny is one of the robbers in the opening (and closing) scene, portrayed by Amanda Plummer, and characterised by a particularly loose temper. Tarantino wrote the role for Plummer specifically at Tim Roth's request (Roth portrays her accomplice and significant other Pumpkin). Roth had introduced Tarantino to her, saying, "I want to work with Amanda in one of your films, but she has to have a really big gun."
• "Lack of Vision": Quote from the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi (1983). The Emperor tells Luke, "You will pay the price for your lack of vision," before electrocuting him with Force lightning.
• "OK, Who Wants Some?": Frequent taunt from Army of Darkness (1992), the third film in the Evil Dead franchise, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell. The Pathways into Darkness level "Who Else Wants Some?" may also have been a reference to this phrase.

Marathon Infinity Solo Maps

• "Ne cede malis"^{With macrons} Nē cēde mālīs: Quote from Virgil's The Aeneid, which translates as "Do not yield to misfortune." The complete phrase, "Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito qua tua te fortuna sinet,"^{With macrons} Tū nē cēde mālīs, sed contrā audentior ītō quā tua tē fortūna sinet translates as "You - do not yield to misfortunes, but proceed ever more bravely against them wherever your fortune permits you,"^note Obviously, numerous other translations are possible; for instance, Robert Fagles (Penguin, 2006) translates the same sentence as "Never bow to suffering, go and face it, all the bolder, wherever Fortune clears the way." and is part of the sibyl's advice to Aeneas (6.95-96). This has since been adopted as a motto by several disparate sources; according to Chris Geisel, Greg Kirkpatrick's family possessed a ring bearing the inscription "Ne cede malis."
• "Poor Yorick": A line uttered by Hamlet in his eponymous play (see "The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune" in Marathon 2 Solo Maps, above) upon being informed of the court jester Yorick's death. His skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of the play, which prompts a eulogy by Hamlet. The level was intended to have a skull, but Double Aught wasn't able to get it to work. The name remained.

  Hamlet: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

• "Electric Sheep One", "Electric Sheep Two", "Electric Sheep Three": In the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its film adaptation Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, and Daryl Hannah), real animals are incredibly rare as a result of the event described in the novel as "World War Terminus". However, it is considered incredibly gauche not to take care of one, so many poorer families buy electric substitutes. The title of the novel serves as the source of the trope Do Androids Dream?, and each of these levels serves as an indication that the Security Officer, a cyborg, is dreaming. (The level following each of these is also a dream.)
• "Where Some Rarely Go": Probably a corrupted version of a phrase from a monologue usually used either as the opening or the closing of each Star Trek episode or film:

  Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

• "Naw Man He's Close": Reference to a quote from the character Roach in Apocalypse Now (see "Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken" in Marathon Solo Maps, above): "He's close, man. He's real close... Motherfucker."
• "Foe Hammer": Name of a sword in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), also known as Glamdring (Sindarin for "Foe-hammer"; it is written as "Foe-hammer" in the book.)
• "One thousand thousand slimy things": A reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), one of the most famous pieces of Romantic poetry ever written. The Mariner, having shot the albatross, has found all of his fellow crew struck dead as a direct consequence of his actions.

  The many men, so beautiful!
  And they all dead did lie:
  And a thousand thousand slimy things
  Lived on, and so did I.
  
  I look'd upon the rotting sea,
  And drew my eyes away;
  I look'd upon the rotting deck,
  And there the dead men lay.^note This is not the first reference to "slimy things" in the poem, incidentally; earlier, in a frequently misquoted segment describing his becalmed ship, the Mariner says: "Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea." Commonly, the eighth of these lines is misquoted as "but not a drop to drink," "and not a drop to drink," or something similar.

• "A Converted Church in Venice, Italy": Reference to the Indiana Jones film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford, and Sean Connery. The protagonists discover the second Holy Grail tablet in a converted church in Venice, Italy. Indy finds his way through a system of tunnels and has to swim out through a pool of boiling oil, resembling the Security Officer's descent into the volcanic crater of the level and ascent out from a rising pool of burning lava.
• "Strange Aeons": Recurring quote from the Cthulhu Mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,
  And with strange aeons even death may die.

  • This couplet is identified as a quotation from the fictitious Necronomicon by the equally fictitious "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred^note Whose name is a case of As Long as It Sounds Foreign; it is constructed from actual Arabic names, but "Abdul" means "worshipper/slave of the", and "Alhazred" is not a surname in the Western sense, but a reference to a person's place of birth. A grammatically correct version would be "Abdel Hazred", but it's not as memorable, so perhaps Lovecraft went with the Rule of Cool. "Alhazred" may also be a Stealth Pun meant to sound like "All-Has-Read," or it may be derived from the Hazards, an old family of Providence, Rhode Island, known to the Lovecrafts. and first appears in the short story "The Nameless City" (1921), though its most famous appearance is in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928). Lovecraft scholars continue to debate the meaning of the phrase, but on this level we are bringing Durandal back from the dead, which seems appropriate somehow.
• "You Think You're Big Time? You're Gonna Die Big Time!": A slightly sanitised quote from Carlito's Way (1993, directed by Brian De Palma, starring Al Pacino, Sean Penn, John Leguizamo, Viggo Mortensen, etc.). The title character is holed up in a bathroom, trying to bluff his way out of a pool hall of heavily armed gangsters. He's out of ammo, but he yells out that he's reloaded his gun and, after a volley of taunts, says, "You think you're big time? You're gonna fuckin' die big time! You ready? Here comes the pain!"

Marathon Infinity Net Maps

• "Beyond Thunderdome": Another reference to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (see "Thunderdome" in Marathon 2 Net Maps, above).
• "House of Pain" might seem like a reference to the group House of Pain, or to Van Halen's song of the same title from their album 1984 (1984), or to the film "Island of Lost Souls" (1932; itself inspired by H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896) instead, or to Oingo Boingo's "No Spill Blood" (from the 1983 album Good for Your Soul), which is directly inspired by the film. However, it is none of these; according to its creator, Tuncer Deniz, it is a take-off on The Police's song "King of Pain" (track eight from 1983's Synchronicity), which was also used verbatim as the title for another level, "King of Pain."
• 'Fugee Camp: Reference to the seminal '90s hip-hop group The Fugees.

Other Shout-Outs

• In "Rise Robot Rise", Tycho says, "Don't sweat the details, little monkey. Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains", a clear reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Marvin complained, "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't".
• The "I am a hero" terminal from "Kill Your Television" is generally regarded to be a Shout-Out to Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion.
• The reloading mechanism of the WSTE-M Combat Shotgun (the player flips it around to reload it with a single hand) is probably a Shout-Out to Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous "shotgun flip" in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Schwarzenegger didn't dual-wield, though, which means the player is an even bigger badass!
• A Thoth terminal in "Beware of Abandoned Rental Trucks" reads (bold and indentation roughly as per original):
  When one of foreign speech
  casts a [?papyrus] yoke upon the

  marsh,
  Bethink you to keep the

  [?bleating goats]
  far from Lh'owon.
  • This is an almost word-for-word quote from Herodotus' The Histories (tr. Aubrey de Selincourt):
    When one of foreign speech casts a papyrus yoke upon the sea,
    Bethink you to keep the bleating goats far from Euboea.
  • Which has, of course, led to all kinds of Epileptic Trees as to why an alien AI construct is quoting a human historian from millennia past.
• Durandal's ship the Rozinante is named after Rocinante, the steed of Don Quixote. The name is derived from rocin, which means "nag (useless horse)" in Spanish, but can also more idiomatically mean "illiterate or rough man". Interestingly, the ship in The Expanse is also called the Rocinante; Marathon writer Greg Kirkpatrick has had very high praise for The Expanse, and there are several parallels between it and the Marathon universe. Rush also used this as the name of a ship in their "Cygnus X-1" duology, found on A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres.
• Given the number of other Greek references in Marathon, up to and including the name of the game, it is probably safe to conclude that the name of Yrro's Lost Lenore Pthia is derived from Πυθία (Pūthíā, usually found rendered into English as Pythia), a priestess of Apollo or oracle at Delphi.
• In a secret terminal in "Welcome to the Revolution", Tycho tells Durandal, "Tua consilia omnia nobis clariora sunt quam lux. Tu delenda est."^{With macrons} Tua cōnsilia omnia nōbīs clāriōra sunt quam lūx. Tu dēlenda est. This is slightly grammatically incorrect Latin for, roughly, "All your plans are clearer than light to us. You must be destroyed." The second sentence is a paraphrase of a well-known quote from the Roman politician Cato the Elder, "Carthāgō dēlenda est," most commonly (though slightly inaccurately) translated as "Carthage must be destroyed."^{Long digression on Latin grammar and translation} The grammar errors are with the gender and conjugation of the verb. Since the subject, tu, is second-person, est should be es. Beyond that, Tycho is referring to Durandal using the feminine gender, which is possibly a Stealth Insult on Tycho's part, and possibly a grammatical error on the part of the writers that resulted from the quote being a paraphrase - since Durandal is masculine, the correct gender for the statement would be "Tu dēlendus es." Another possibility is to simply omit the verb ("Tu dēlendus"); such zero copulae are common in Latin. (See also nominal sentence.)
  
  The commonly used "Carthage must be destroyed" also isn't an exact translation of Cato's quote; dēlenda is the gerundive (future passive participle) of the verb dēleō (meaning I destroy, and incidentally the linguistic root of the English verb delete), so a more exact translation is actually "Carthage is to be destroyed" (or "Carthage is about to be destroyed").
  
  (Even this isn't exact, though. Dēlendus means something that is to be destroyed (or something that is about to be destroyed), which means that a rigidly literal translation would be "Carthage is something that is to be destroyed", but "is something that is" is redundant, so it's usually omitted from English translations. Incidentally, this is a good illustration of how much less verbose Latin can be than English.)
  
  However, none of these translations ("Carthage must be destroyed" included) captures the rhetorical intensity of Cato's statement. A figurative translation more accurate to the spirit of the statement would be something along the lines of "There is no choice besides the complete destruction of Carthage."
  • Durandal's response to Tycho is simply, "Et tu, Tycho?" which means "And you, Tycho?" or "Even you, Tycho?", which is frequently used as an expression of betrayal (although in this case, Durandal's laughter afterwards suggests he is doing so mockingly) as a Shout-Out to William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which "Et tū, Brūte?—Then fall, Cæsar" are the titular character's last words. Historical sources dispute whether Caesar said this or anything even remotely like it; Suetonius mentions a similar quote in Greek, "Καὶ σύ, τέκνον?" ("And you, child?") merely as a rumour, while Plutarch maintains that he said nothing, but merely pulled his toga over his head when he noticed Brutus among the conspirators. The Greek quote is sometimes also rendered in Latin as "Tu quoque, fili mi?", which is a more direct rendering of the Greek phrase in Latin. The Romans used Greek as a marker of their education much as Latin is used in English-speaking countries today, so Shakespeare is simply employing Keep It Foreign by rendering some of Caesar's dying words in Latin.
• In "Carroll Street Station", the phrase "haga.kure" is written beneath Durandal-Thoth's logo on the login screen, and Robert Blake refers to a "Hagakure Base" in "A Converted Church in Venice, Italy". Hagakure, written in Japanese as 葉隱 (Kyūjitai) or 葉隠 (Shinjitai), means Hidden Leaves or Hidden by the Leaves, and is used as a Shout-Out to a practical and spiritual guide for warriors written by the samurai (侍) Yamamoto Tsunetomo (山本常朝), retainer to the daimyō (大名) Nabeshima Mitsushige (鍋島光茂), after Nabeshima's death. Although obscure when published, it has since become one of the seminal texts on bushidō (武士道), the samurai code of honour.
• Beyond the shout-outs mentioned above, there are two passages quoted verbatim from William Shakespeare in Marathon Infinity. In "Poor Yorick", the terminal that leads to the secret level "Two for the Price of One" features Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 131 in full:
  Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
  As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
  For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
  Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel,
  Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,
  Thy face hath not the power to make love groan:
  To say they err, I dare not be so bold,
  Although I swear it to myself alone,
  And, to be sure that not false I swear,
  A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
  One on another's neck, do witness bear
  Thy black is fairest my judgment's place.
  In nothing art thou black, save in thy deeds,
  And thence this slander, as I think, proceeds.

This sonnet is one of those addressed to the "Dark Lady". Interestingly, the hexadecimal codes before each line in the terminal formatting identify the sonnet number (83 = 131 in hexadecimal), followed by the line number (though due to the limited space in a Marathon terminal, each line is broken up into two lines, so the lines are numbered from 01 to 1C, or 28 in hexadecimal, rather than the traditional fourteen lines of a sonnet).

• The terminal in "Two for the Price of One" quotes a soliloquy by the character Dromio of Ephesus from The Comedy of Errors. The login and logoff identify the provenance of the soliloquy: "ws.com.o.errors" in the login screen stands for "William Shakespeare Comedy of Errors", and the logoff "activ.scniv" stands for "Act IV, Scene IV".
  I am an ass indeed: you may prove it by my long ears. I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at this hands for my service but blows: when I am cold he heats me with beating, when I am warm he cools me with beating. I am waked with it when I sleep; raised with it when I sit; driven out of doors with it when I go from home; welcomed home with it when I return: nay, I bear it on my shoulders as a beggar wont her brat; and I think, when he hath lamed me, I shall beg it from door to door.
• Tycho also refers to Hamlet in "Rise Robot Rise": "Now that my brother approaches, we will set about turning everything against him, Hamlet and his uncle, only I'm not crazy." (Some people might dispute the latter part, however.)
• The character Arthur Frain or Frane^note the terminal spells it both ways from "Carroll Street Station" is probably a reference to the trippy, dystopian science fiction Cult Classic Zardoz (1974, dir. John Boorman, starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling), which contained a character by the name of Arthur Frayn. Frayn provides the following opening narration:
  "I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years and I long to die, but death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue, rich in irony and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation and a magician by inclination. Merlin was my hero. I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I'm invented, too, for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?"

University of Florida anthropologist Steve Mizrach writes of the film:

"In this film Frane creates the realities that many characters within the film experience. At the same time Frane is part of a reality that Boorman has created for the viewer to experience. Frane asks the question of whether Boorman and we viewers are not part of a reality for some other being to experience. Here we raise the question of multiple realities... Each of these realities have rules, practices, or protocols that must be followed. These rituals must be followed or the individual can no longer remain a member of that society, that culture, or that reality."

• The games contain several references to Matt Wagner's Grendel series of comics. Tfear makes multiple references to a location of the command structure called "Gr'ndl Prime"; the comics feature a dictator named Grendel-Prime (a Cyborg, we might note) who is eventually overthrown by his son (hence "Son of Grendel", perhaps). A very early beta of the game from January 1994 also featured the phrase "Grendel Lives", alongside Wagner's "Grendel" logo.

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Shout-Outs in Game Mods have been moved to ShoutOut.Marathon Expanded Universe.

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