Trivia / Marathon

• Colbert Bump: While the Marathon series has always existed in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to its Spiritual Successor Halo, MandaloreGaming's coverage of the entire trilogy (plus Pathways into Darkness) brought far more attention to the games with an overview of their actual content both in gameplay and story.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Bizarre in that it comes from an official Bungie product. The Mac Action Sack's synopsis for Marathon 2 claims that "it's time to settle the score with Durandal, your old nemesis from Marathon"; not only is there no point in the game where Durandal and the Security Officer are at odds, but Durandal underwent a change of heart between the first and second games. (It is entirely possible that this was to avoid spoiling M1 for new players, though.)
• Creator-Driven Successor: The Marathon series is a (very distant) sequel to Bungie's previous game, Pathways into Darkness. Halo is the spiritual successor to the Marathon games, and also includes enough Shout Outs to make one wonder if the connection might run a bit deeper...
• Executive Meddling: The reason that only Marathon 2 has an Xbox Live Arcade port: reportedly, Freeverse and Bungie wanted to port all three games, but Microsoft vetoed it.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Aleph One project, ensuring that Marathon would go on with or without Bungie's guidance (currently with, since Microsoft spun Bungie off again).
• Promoted Fanboy: Many, such as Craig Mullins (who would go on to be a concept artist of high renown himself), Randall "Frigidman" Shaw, and Tuncer Deniz.
  • Though the “boy” part is a bit misleading in the case of Craig Mullins, as the work that brought him to Bungie's attention shows. The page image on the main page is his work, by the way.
• Referenced by...:
  • Florida grindcore band Maruta's third album, Remain Dystopian (2015), contains a song called "Durandal" that refers to the Marathon character. Warning to photosensitive epileptics: the video contains a lot of flashing images and other stimuli that may induce seizures. The imagery may also disturb some viewers. Complete lyrics (because it's grindcore, the song is less than a minute long and contains only three lines of lyrics):
    From deep stasis I resurface
    Durandal shall guide me and I shall follow
    To serve the construct's will to no end
  • Particle Man also has a song called "Durandal", sung from the eponymous character's perspective and available here. Sample lyrics:
    Leela would have you save humanity
    How like a woman to care!
    My circuits run one bit deeper
    Than any of you are aware
    [...]
    In the cold green light of the alien ship
    I guide you to find my new friends
    If you win you survive, tear down the hive
    If not then our little game will end
  • Some of the pirate ships in Stellaris have a chance of being named Leela, Durandal, or Tycho. There is also a slim chance that an alien may be dubbed a W'rkncacnter.
  • TRON 2.0 contains several references to the Marathon series, including the phrase "Frog blast the vent core" and infected program enemies named "(Ra*mpa^ncy)" and "Durandal". Two of the people that worked on it, Frank Rooke and Courtney Evans, had previously worked as map designers (and, in Courtney's case, writers) for the Marathon fan scenario Tempus Irae; Courtney mentioned that his work on Tempus is part of what got him hired at Monolith in the first place. (Frank designed "Polygonum Opus", "Towel Boy", "You Gotta Sin to Get Saved", and some net levels; Courtney designed "You Got Me in a Vendetta Kinda Mood", "...evil so singularly personified...", and "I Haven't Killed Anyone Since 1485".)
• Sequel First: Marathon 2: Durandal was the only game in the series to be officially released outside the Mac for Windows until Bungie made the Trilogy and the Engine freeware and the fans made Aleph One.
• Universe Concordance: Marathon Story Page. It is notable enough to have an official secret (really secret) map in honour of its Admin.
  • Universe Chronology: Here.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: There have been a few over the years, including:
  • Hidden levels in the first game featuring such pleasantries as invincible, wall-climbing red Drinniols; the most well-known level title is "A Good Way to Die". Posited by the otherwise-accurate "Marathon Secrets Guide"; after the Trilogy was ported over to Aleph One, a few scenario makers borrowed and defictionalized these concepts.
  • Dr'At'Er, a supposed fourth entry running on a proper 3D engine; one website claimed to have screenshots, which were actually altered from Quake. The giveaway? The title's a reversed slur.
  • Marathon Gold, a collection of the Trilogy and a few well-known fan scenarios that were mentioned in a supposed Bungie newsletter. It, too, was a false rumour.
• What Could Have Been: The original plan for the first game called for the plot to branch at various points depending on how many BoBs you saved in certain levels. This was scrapped and the only remnant of that plan is differing messages from Leela depending on how many of them you saved.
  • It is worth noting that the capacity to do this was still built into the engine, and that when a player transitions from the end of one level they can (in theory) be sent to any other map-maker-defined level in the game, regardless of level order. While conventionally the player is sent to the next level in the order, some mod-makers have taken full advantage of this ability to alter the next level that the player goes to based on what they accomplished in that level, with resulting branching plotlines. Rubicon is the most famous but by no means the only or even the first example of a mod that does this.
  • The alpha version, which could be described as Pathways into Darkness: Space Edition, was set not on a ship, but on a hollowed-out asteroid near Pluto; the Science Officer is sent to investigate the disappearance of this asteroid's colonists and finds only feral aliens.
  • A later draft had colonists uncovering a strange device that turns out to be a Trojan Horse for the nearby hostile aliens; by the time the Science Officer arrives, things are looking very dire.
  • One screenshot from a build between the alpha and the final shows a compass and injury-tracker integrated into the HUD; both were dropped, with the reason given for the former being that it required more horsepower than most Macs of the time could spare. We can get an idea of what the compass would've been like with Eternal, which implements the idea.
  • Three enemies were cut from the first game: the Hound (a pet for the Hunters that couldn't climb stairs), the Pfhor crewman (harmless stilt-bots that were the alien equivalent to the BoBs), and the Armageddon Beast (a nasty-looking Boss in Mook Clothing). The crewman was dropped due to memory limits, and the Beast got the boot because no levels were designed such that it would be fun to fight.
  • While it's possible that this was always meant to be temporary, in the original level notes for Marathon 2, Durandal is consistently polite to the Security Officer and shows few/no traces of his earlier instability. This doesn't stop Tycho (himself not quite as big a jerkass as in the final) from trying to cast doubt on his brother's true intentions.
  • The level "Foe Hammer" was originally meant to have drones firing at you from the outside windows, but this idea was dropped because drone corpses kept littering the landscape (though it still could've been avoided if they'd lowered the floor of the outside polygons, kept them space-textured, and changed the monster physics of the drones to make them climb greater distances). Several levels that weren't vacuum levels in the final game, including this one, were also originally intended to be vacuum levels, though in this case, this may have been for the best since the one-two punch of "Acme Station" and "Post Naval Trauma" was already punishing enough. But that's why you see oxygen rechargers in a lot of levels that aren't vacuum - plus why Tycho tells you to "drink vacuum" when, of course, you don't lose any oxygen after he teleports you out to space.
  • "Naw Man He's Close" also seems to have been initially constructed with a climb up a control tower above Pfhor slime. The map was substantially revamped before the final release of the game, and the tower didn't make it in. "One Thousand Thousand Slimy Things" was also intended to feature a climb up a tower, but this was scrapped because it was considered too similar to the one in Marathon 2 ("The Hard Stuff Rules..."), which was deemed architecturally more interesting.
  • While this hasn't been explicitly confirmed, the architecture of "Come and Take Your Medicine" certainly makes it look like the level was never finished - it's only necessary to explore a small portion of the level to complete it. It's possible Bungie just didn't have time to finish touching it up to make more of the architecture relevant to the mission before releasing the game. It does seem like more of the level was meant to be explored, as there's an odd breakable panel that originally opened up some locked doors; in the final version of the level, those doors can be opened immediately. Also unusual is that it's a gigantic water level with no oxygen recharger. However, there's also the Alternate Character Interpretation that all of this was intentional as a form of Character Development for Durandal: he tells you there's no reward to exploring the rest of the level, and unless you enjoy fighting Troopers, there isn't, at least in single-player games; the only items of any real value to be found anywhere in the level are the first alien weapon (the next one to be found is a couple of levels later, in "Ex cathedra") and a small amount of ammo. (In cooperative games, players can also obtain some weapons that only show up in network games.)
  • "Ex cathedra" initially featured a much more complicated puzzle before swimming was introduced into the game engine - it was initially necessary to make some skilled jumps to navigate the level. Once swimming was introduced, this entire puzzle became superfluous.
  • Greg Kirkpatrick himself considers "Charon Doesn't Make Change" one. He says that if he'd had time to think about it, he'd have doubled the size of the level and made it gigantic.
  • The original level notes for Marathon 2 would have resulted in a very different game in several important ways. Several enemy types are listed that didn't make it into the final game, and several levels would've been vacuum levels (the final game didn't contain any vacuum levels at all). A lot of levels would've been in a different order or had different titles, and several terminals were unsurprisingly rewritten significantly for the final game; in particular, Durandal's survival after "Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!" would've been revealed almost instantly. There also would've been a secret level at the end entitled "Never Eat Yellow Snow" (a possible Shout-Out to a Frank Zappa song from Apostrophe (')) that would've contained Pathways into Darkness textures and monsters. The level notes also make it clear that Bungie had the idea for VacBobs early in the development process of Marathon 2, but they only actually made it into Infinity.
  • A PlayStation port of either Marathon 2 or Infinity was under consideration at one point, and canned for unknown reasons.
  • Despite what some people would tell you, Infinity is not "Marathon 3". An actual project titled "Marathon 3" was in development for around two months before being supplanted by Myth: The Fallen Lords; the short version is that Bungie didn't want to chase Quake's tail. Only one possible asset of M3, a single image of Durandal's face (under June 21), has been uncovered thus far.
  • One relating to the Aleph One source port: originally, the developers had hoped to release version 1.4 on April 1, 2021, because it contained several features that people might assume were April Fool's jokes, such as 60 fps (and uncapped) interpolation - the joke being that these features weren't jokes at all. Unfortunately, the development process was slightly too slow, and a 1.4 release candidate was only released a few days earlier, on March 28, 2021.
• Working Title: Marathon was originally meant to be a placeholder title but after joking about calling it Pathways Into Uranus as a nod to their previous game, Pathways into Darkness, Bungie just stuck with Marathon.

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Trivia for Game Mods has been moved to Marathon Expanded Universe.