Seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses float around the inside of hangar ninety six, and they are all screaming at me.
- I once boasted to be able to count the atoms in a cloud, to understand them all, predict them, and so did I predict you, but this new chaos is entirely terrible, mindless, obeying rules that I don't comprehend. And it is hungry.-Durandal, Ne Cede Malis
Even back then Bungie knew how to scare the shit out of us.
Examples of Nightmare Fuel in the original games:
- The dark and claustrophobic design of the Colony Ship Marathon gives plenty of opportunities for this, the first of which is meeting the S'pht compiler face-to-face in the very tight maintenance tunnel. It's occasionally hard to tell whether the dark rooms, claustrophobic hallways, and stealthy enemies are meant to be scary, but boy howdy, they are.
- If you're not suspecting it, the first encounter with an alien—not even ten seconds into the game—is to have it make a loud, startling screeching noise and run after you. It is a VERY effective jumpscare, even if it isn't too much of a threat.
- The Jjaro installation from Infinity is one big call back to the first game, now with the addition of ambient sounds that are described in the game's editors as the ship creaking, but can be easily interpreted as the voice of the sleeping god struggling in its prison.
- In the first Marathon game, when you blow up a BOB or another player, they explode into a bunch of intestines, gore, and brown mush.
- And in the next two games, they explode into flesh-covered bones in a pool of blood.
- Also most of the aliens, particularly the Enforcers, who, in the second and third game, pop.
- And other aliens native to the planet fly towards you and EXPLODE on you. Not pretty.
- In the first game, you can see BOBs trapped in Pfhor stasis pods on the alien ship. Their faces are pale and the pods are pulsating.
- Other things in the alien ship pulsate too. It seems as if most of the ship is organic.
- The Pfhor seem to be making artificial humans, which are called simulacrums. They run up to you and explode, and it's almost impossible to tell which one it is. The creepy thing? You're told that they're robots, but sometimes, it's implied that they're also captured humans ("Innocent Colonists") who had their blood replaced with a yellow liquid (that's explosive, too) and they had their brains adjusted so that they would run towards any human with a weapon.
- In "Fatum iustum stultorum", the real humans have left for Earth, so the Pfhor just start teleporting out as many simulacrums as they can. Some portions of the level are very dark and underwater, and it's difficult to punch the simulacrums effectively underwater since they move about as fast as you do - bear in mind that you don't have any underwater weapons in M2 other than your fists. It can be very paranoia-inducing trying to kill off the simulacrums underwater, particularly on Total Carnage, where having one blow-up on you will take off about 3/4 of a bar of health.
- At one point in Durandal, you get captured by the Pfhor. The resulting chapter screen shows what is presumably either a BoB or you, bloodied and clamped down, face messily removed to the unveiling of circuitry beneath and what looks to be a device coming in from behind ready to continue some Cold-Blooded Torture. Welcome to the Big House, and this was at least one of the Security Officer's traumas in Infinity.
- The first BGM you hear in the first game
is scary enough, considering the dark hallways and flickering lights in the human ship, but the first BGM you hear in the Pfhor ship is much worse.- "Landing", "Leela", and "Aliens Again" are also extremely creepy. Makes the dark corridors that much scarier.
- Did anyone else think the first door you went to was unusually loud? It startled this one enough to jump.
- Some of the message terminals can pretty disturbing.
- The Dream levels in general, which, among other things, includes the terminals about the Hangar 96.
- And this. The fact that these terminals are so nigh-impossible to figure out is about 75% of what makes them so creepy in the first place.
- The story of Gheritt White. (Third terminal in that level.) It's found at the top of a nigh-inescapable prison cell.
- The Dream
- Everything about the W'rkncacnter. It spits on the laws of physical reality, seems to revel in destruction and chaos, cannot be killed by any known force, and is never directly seen. But surely, Durandal has at least some idea of how to deal with it, right?.. Nope; for all his power and intelligence, the W'rkncacnter is as obtuse to him as it was to the Jjaro. And Durandal is flat fucking terrified of it.
- To give an idea of how terrifying a single one of these "dreaming gods" are, a lone W'rkncacnter is awakened after the sun of Lh'owon is destroyed in the second game. Yes, it survived the destruction of the star that was keeping it dormant and the rest of the surrounding solar system. And from there, its mere existence unravels the rules of reality so hard that the Security Officer seemingly hops entire timelines to escape, because you can't win, Durandal can't win, Tycho sure as hell can't win — the moment the W'rkncacnter is released, that entire timeline is effectively dead with no knowledge of how it unfolds. And this happens to at least five or six of them in rapid succession, with no count for just how many times it could've already happened.
- To put into perspective how bad the W'rkncacnter are, Durandal's only thing remotely resembling a plan in the first timeline is very simple; Stall as long as he can for you to steal a ship and run as far away as you can.
- "WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?!?"
- "I'm alri-AAAA!"
- And their messages are being comm'd directly into your helmet...
- When a terminal describes the Hulks/Drinniol, it says that, due to their zero body fat, they need constant feeding. Another terminal mentions a Drinniol lifting some poor bastard and smashing him against a pillar.
- The "dream" levels in Infinity, especially the messages you find in them, which may or may not be describing the Security Officer's life before serving on the Marathon. The first terminal involves him encountering a hulking giant of a man armed with a double-bladed knife; this man proceeds to have a seizure right in front of the Officer, choking out "durability" in-between puking. Watching all of this is a gang of black-suited men. The Officer, as scared out of his mind as anyone else in his situation would be, takes the double-bladed knife and runs for it.
- The very first message Tycho sends the player in the first game is a desperate warning that the crisis you're attempting to fight your way out of is Durandal's fault—as his code is being picked apart. He eventually gets better... for a given definition of "better". By the time the second game rolls around, Tycho is a ruthless sadist who can arguably match his brother in intellectual fortitude but has none of Durandal's redeeming qualities. Infinity sees him, in one arc, making his command of the Pfhor absolute by hacking a vital target's teleporter so that it dumps him into space. You had to help Tycho in his treason, by the way. And this isn't the only arc where he strong-arms the Security Officer into working for him; notice how he addresses you as "conditioned unit 7"?...
- If you're not partial to black humour, then the BoBs' (and Security Officer's) "crushed/immolated" death wails are pretty unpleasant.
- The F'lickta aren't too difficult to handle as long as you've got ammo, but they look and sound intimidating, and are incredibly hostile towards all other entities (they'll prioritize Pfhor, but there'll be plenty of instances where the only other thing around is you). One terminal also mentions that the Pfhor couldn't retrieve any juvenile F'licka for study because the parents would kill their own young to prevent this.
- While he mellows out considerably later on, Durandal's behaviour in the first game can be rather unsettling when he's not an entertaining jerk. The first possible encounter with him is when he's at the height of his Anger-induced madness, and his conversations with the Security Officer often go into existentially-troubling territories.
- The demo version of "Ne Cede Malis" makes some worrying implications of what's happening to the Security Officer at the end of each failed timeline.
- As the player destroys more of Durandal's core in "Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!" and "Hang Brain", bits of the ship cease to function properly, and the lighting starts to fail. The latter level also has abnormally powerful troopers teleporting in at random intervals. On higher difficulties, this is terrifying and a massive source of Paranoia Fuel.
- The Pfhor Empire's ultimate weapon, the trih xeem, is essentially a solar-system buster that they deploy if a colony or area of interest is proving too difficult to subjugate. There's no telling how often they've resorted to it, and if Durandal essentially taking the Security Officer and S'pht and fleeing Lh'owon at the second game's conclusion is any indication, there's no way of actually stopping the damn thing once it's launched towards the system's sun.
- Battleroids might just be in the running for the most terrifying Super-Soldier in fiction. What happens when you take a corpse, stuff it full of cybernetics and god knows what else, and then send it up against your foes? Why, you get a One-Man Army that can butcher their way through hundreds, maybe even thousands, of foes entirely on their own. Sounds normal? Well, how's about the fact that, unlike most Super Soldiers, they can blend in among normal humans flawlessly? And they don't even know that they're not human? Remember the absolute carnage the Security Officer caused? Well, he's just one battleroid. Imagine what ten could do—or what a hundred could do.
- Battleroids were first known to be used during the Icarus-Thermopylae War; said war effectively ended when they made it into the asteroids themselves and slaughtered their populations down to the last man. Bad enough on its own, but the terminal you read about this on makes it clear that battleroids are seen as nothing but tools and weapons (surely you wouldn't casually discuss "proper storage and use" of humans, would you?..). Now, keep in mind that Strauss, a textual abuser, knew that there were ten battleroids on board the UESC Marathon and was strongly implied to have plans for them...
- To say nothing of the Security Officer himself. The amount of Cruel and Unusual Death and Ludicrous Gibs this guy leaves in his wake comes across as more than a little bit unsettling. For a little bit of gravitas, look back after you've finished a combat encounter, especially if you'd primarily used your fists, and let it sink in. And there's nothing stopping him from slaughtering fellow humans, besides them potentially fighting back in the second game, meaning nothing is stopping the other cyborgs from letting loose with no care for collateral damage if it means taking down the Pfhor.
- The capper, as pointed out in MandaloreGaming's video covering Infinity, is that the Battleroids (or at the very least the Security Officer) are stuffed full of Jjaro tech—of which causes the human mind to potentially begin experiencing Rampancy much like an AI in the series (which thematically fits as each chapter name in Infinity are synonyms to the three stages of Rampancy, reflecting the Security Officer's journey) that causes them to progressively become a Reality Warper that can dimension hop through time and space due to integrating closer to the quantum mechanics that make up the universe... and the people who made them are unaware that they had accidentally created nigh-omnipotent, near-immortal gods that can exist anywhere, capable of altering fate even against an Eldritch Abomination that threatens all space-time by just existing. Hell, just the revelation alone that the Security Officer is travelling between timelines is enough to send the overly smug Tycho into a full-blown Villainous Breakdown out of a mixture of existential horror and sheer rage all at once.
The examples of Nightmare Fuel in Game Mods have been moved to NightmareFuel.Marathon Expanded Universe.
