Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trivia / Marathon Expanded Universe

Go To

Trivia for Game Mods of Bungie's Marathon series, which we've collectively dubbed the Marathon Expanded Universe.

  • Approval of God:
    • Rampancy.net's Let's Play of Eternal had three of the creators drop into the chatroom in various episodes, culminating in the Grand Finale where all three actually participated in the network game and provided voice commentary.
    • RyokoTK made Phoenix with the intention for speedruns to be possible, and expressed approval of a fan's 37-minute speedrun when it was completed.
    • The codirector of Eternal 1.3 provided commentary in Twitch chat for an "any%" speedrun of the game at a speedrun marathon (which incidentally is the current Kindergarten world record as of March 2022).
  • Ascended Fanon: Eternal 1.3 makes a number of elements that were previously subtext into text, thus making a number of (often common) fanon interpretations of its story into part of its canon. Examples include Hathor's personality before she was awakened as a disembodied mind, her suffering Sanity Slippage as a result of no longer possessing a body, her losing a large portion of her memory as a result of our destroying the computer banks housing it in "Deep Into the Grotto", and her Heel–Face Turn in chapter five.
  • Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: Some developers can suffer this. One particular developer has contributed in some fashion to Eternal; the revised Tempus Irae; Where Monsters Are in Dreams; the revised Apotheosis; the Trojan Director's Cut; his own mod called Marathon Chronicles; remastered sounds for Marathon 1, Marathon Infinity, and Pathways into Darkness; and a YouTube channel he maintains with thousands of videos. Most other developers aren't this severe about this, but this trope has no doubt contributed to some of the Schedule Slips various mods sometimes see.
  • Creator Backlash: The creator of Phoenix, although not too critical of the game overall, has been rather dismissive of the game's story. He also didn't much care for the level "Escape Two Thousand", owing in large part to the mixture of combat and precise jumps the level requires to complete successfully, though some of this is fixed in the most recent 1.4 release.
  • Creator Breakdown: One of the reasons that Eternal 1.2 was delayed a few months past its original planned release date is that one of its developers suffered one of these in early 2019, which also meant that several planned features were ultimately held for future updates. Eternal 1.2.1 was released in November 2021; at the moment, the creators are hoping to release version 1.3 in 2024 (however, it has suffered several Schedule Slips, primarily due to repeated expansions in feature scope and the creators' Attention Deficit Creator Disorder). Further releases of the game beyond 1.3 have not been ruled out, though it is highly unlikely that they will expand the game as much as 1.2 and 1.3 each did.
  • Creator's Favorite Episode: RyokoTK considers "Roquefortress" the best level of Phoenix.
  • Development Hell: Since many scenarios are the works of small numbers of amateur creators who are often perfectionists and have other commitments besides game development, they don't go as quickly as commercial development projects. Some scenarios such as Where Monsters Are in Dreams, Marathon 1 Redux, and Marathon Chronicles have been in active development for years or even decades. Sometimes creators will release incomplete versions of their games, but sometimes all you get are screenshots or gameplay videos. At the same time, in the best cases, this may end up being a blessing in disguise, because some of these scenarios have ended up being very detailed and refined, particularly if creators keep going back and revising the games in response to player feedback (as has happened in Eternal's case). On the other hand, sometimes you end up with Orphaned Series; Megiddo Game and Return to Marathon are particularly infamous cases of this, since what we did get was so good (Megiddo Game even won Bungie's mapmaking competition. Its creator was later one of the two main people behind Tempus Irae, though, so it wasn't a complete loss).
  • Doing It for the Art: Since most of these mods contain Bungie artwork and other assets, they can't be sold; thus, the primary motivation of their creators is likely nothing more than the desire to create video games. Beyond Attention Deficit Creator Disorder and their creators' other commitments, this also seems to be the primary reason many projects' release dates have to be taken with a grain of salt: the creators often appear to be uncompromising perfectionists. (Perhaps tellingly, Phoenix 1.4 was released some twelve years after version 1.0, and a 1.5 version is under development; and, as of 2024, Eternal 1.3 is under development roughly twenty years after its first release.)
  • He Also Did:
  • Promoted Fanboy: In some cases, new revisions of mods have been co-developed by people who were already fans of the earlier releases. Examples include Eternal and Tempus Irae.
  • Reality Subtext: Eternal has the War on Terror (topical when the game first appeared in 2004, but less so now) as an inspiration for a major subplot of the game, but like many other aspects of the plot, it's done quite subtly and still has applicability to other real-world events. The increased prevalence of authoritarianism in modern politics has arguably made some aspects of its message timelier now than they were in 2004.
  • Saved from Development Hell: Eternal has had a lengthy development cycle that has lasted for more than sixteen years as of this writing and is still not complete, as seen on its development page, which lists all the release dates. The first version of the game appeared in late 2004. Version 1.0 came out in 2008, 1.1 in 2015, 1.2 in 2019, and 1.2.1 in 2021. Several of these suffered Schedule Slips for various reasons. Version 1.3 is currently in development, with hopes for an official release in 2022, and version 1.4 (the possibly final version?) tentatively planned for release some unspecified time after that.note 
  • Schedule Slip: It's best to take release date estimates from fan projects with a rather large grain of salt... as the edit history of this very page will probably make clear. Reasons include, but are not limited to, real-life commitments (these are fan projects, after all), perfectionism, creators dividing their attention between multiple projects, and creators working only sporadically on projects.
  • Throw It In!: Sometimes features of level design are the result of happy accidents. "Killing the Giants as They Sleep" in Eternal 1.2 is a composite of two levels from earlier versions of the game, "May the Pfharce Be With You" and "Forever My Greatest and Only Love". The latter was removed from 1.1 due to a story rewrite, but the two levels were combined into one giant level, the largest in the game by polygon count, in 1.2. The happy accident is that both of those levels centred around an octagonal architectural structure featuring the ubiquitous Pfhor slime, which "Killing the Giants" takes full advantage of by stacking them on top of one another, but it's unlikely the designers of the original levels had this in mind when making them, since they originally weren't even intended to be part of the same ship. Regardless, this particular design accident helps the two segments feel more like part of the same space. It also helps that the two levels have fairly similar architectural styles (partially because the same designer designed part of "May the Pfharce Be With You" and all of "Forever My Greatest and Only Love", and partially as a joke on the stagnancy of Pfhor culture: their architecture hasn't changed meaningfully in some 10,000 years, as shown in the chapter four Pfhor ship levels).
    • This can also apply to story elements. None of the original authors had read Kurt Vonnegut at the time they wrote the original story; however, developers later noted parallels between Slaughterhouse-Five's Tralfamadorians and the ascended Jjaro, and it's now possible to find a few Shout-Outs to Slaughterhouse-Five in the map writing for "Where Giants Have Fallen" (viewable by opening the map in the editor Weland) and also (subtly) in the same level's mournful bird song, which persists even after everything else in the level (besides the player) is dead, just as "Poo-tee-weet?" is the final phrase of Slaughterhouse-Five, which states earlier, "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'". The developers have suggested that existing (if originally coincidental) parallels between Eternal's story and the works of authors such as Vonnegut and Michael Moorcock may be played up further in future releases; indeed, 1.3 already does this somewhat, with Shout-Outs to the philosophers Heraclitus and Friedrich Nietzsche (both of whose works have themes at times similar to Eternal's) and the graphic novel Watchmen being added to 1.3.
  • Trolling Creator: This seems to be at least part of why Apotheosis X has a second Assassin on the level "Don't Step on the Mome Raths" - after seeing how much of a fright the first one gave players, the developers decided to throw in a second one at least partly to troll players who'd played the original Apotheosis, knew to expect the first Assassin, and figured they'd be safe after defeating it. It's in a place that's very similar to where they encountered the first one in the original level, too, and placed sneakily enough that they won't know it's there until it's probably already too late.
    • There's also a secret invincibility and 3x on the level "Lost Behind the Stars" that seems to be there entirely for this reason. It is possible to get them with a well-executed grenade jump or rocket jump, though (the secret nailgun is placed on the level seemingly to encourage players to jump up to a location from which they are visible). Be warned, though; there's a trap hole in version 1.0. (Version 1.1 fixes this.)
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Not so much one for Eternal on its own, but for Halo: Eternal's interpretation of the Jjaro was originally meant to tie in with the story of Halo, before the latter was rewritten to remove most of its connections to the Marathon universe. It would have been interesting to see how they'd have interlocked had that plan not been abandoned.
    • The creators of Rubicon have admitted that the terminals could have tied in better with the level missions if they'd taken another week or so to rewrite them once level development had finished.
    • Eternal's director had quite a few things he'd have done differently in hindsight. The forthcoming 1.3 version is planned to implement a few of these ideas (and more may be included in a subsequent - and probably final - 1.4 release), but several others would require a complete redesign of the game from the ground up. Ultimately, Eternal could still be considered part of a loose trilogy with Phoenix and Rubicon as parts two and three (Kindred Spirits actually links the latter two, though it's only four levels long). However, this still leaves several major plot branches unresolved, potentially to be explored in future games. (The codirector of the most recent 1.2.1 and 1.3 releases is in fact working on a game that plans to do this entitled Marathon Chronicles; info can be found on the Pfhorums or YouTube. It's available as a currently roughly half-finished game, though very little of the planned story is yet implemented in the game itself, and the publicly available build is reportedly years out of date because more recent builds share assets with Tempus Irae Redux that the creator does not wish to release in advance of Tempus Irae Redux itself.)
    • A less substantial case for Eternal is that version 1.2 was initially planned to incorporate rain, snow, and various other effects on some levels, but this lagged some older machines. The engine didn't provide a practical way to make these effects optional at the time of release, so they were instead released separately as a "precipitation branch". Old releases of this branch can be found on Github or on Simplici7y (despite the URL, the latter is an old beta of what ultimately became 1.2.1, but the official release of 1.2.1 in 2021 ultimately omitted precipitation as well). The "ephemera" data type added to Aleph One 1.4 provided a more practical way to make precipitation optional, and Eternal 1.3's preview builds include it.
    • At one point, the creators of Eternal and Rubicon considered merging their projects. It's probably better that they didn't, though, because it's unlikely the combined result would've been longer (or better) than either game was by itself.
    • The old Rubicon site, as well as some of the game's secret levels, detailed the history of the scenario and what was intended for the smaller ones that became part of it. "Chimera" (which became the final's Chimera Plank) would've involved the eponymous ship crashing on Pfhor Prime as it does at the start of Rubicon, except this time it was seemingly part of an ancient Pfhoric prophecy, and in the chaos the player would've found themselves teaming up with a Pfhor AI, Usyrus. Another scenario, from which some plot elements in Rubicon's Salinger Plank originate, wasn't meant to be part of the Marathon universe.
    • There are six bonus levels at the end of Phoenix 1.3 that represent what was to be the first chapter of an abandoned project entitled Thunderstorm, based around the idea of shorter levels that would've focused mostly on exploration and combat. Ryoko abandoned this idea and placed them as secret levels that can be accessed from the secret terminal of "Swan Song"; he has since worked on a Metroid Prime-inspired mod entitled Echoes of the Ashen instead, although owing to its massive scope, it's not clear if he will ever complete this either.
    • Mod developers sometimes take player feedback into consideration when revising mods. Thus, Eternal 1.3's first few previews emphasised that one reason Hathor found existence without a physical body so distasteful is that it left her with lusts that she no longer had any way to satiate. At the start of the game, she'd already spent nine years this way; by chapter four, she's spent over seven hundred. This has been toned down, however, after it became clear that players were reading this as being intended either to present her sexuality as a negative character trait or to suggest that all she needed to fix her problems was to get laid - neither of which, per Word of God, were the case: the authors intended no reading more negative than that it's inadvisable to respond to trauma by using Sex for Solace as a substitute for therapy. Likewise, after preview 3, the developers replaced the infinitely respawning Bobs in several chapter two levels with infinitely respawning Defenders, since players felt the massive cache of fusion batteries players could build up in those levels trivialised the rest of the game's combat. (Players can still build up decent-sized caches of fusion ammo in the first two chapters, but they can no longer pick up hundreds of fusion batteries just from running around "Unlucky Pfhor Some" for a few minutes.)
  • Working Title: Tempus Irae's levels had the following working titles:
    • "Wiping Away the Dirt & Glue" was known as "Sistine Chapel"
    • "Sordidae, turpes et faetidae" was known as "Streets of Milan"
    • "KMG-365" was known as "General Hospital"
    • "For Your Eyes Only" was known as "Easter Island"
    • "Il grande silenzio" was known as "葬列" or "Souretsu" (Japanese for "Funeral Procession"; the creator was listening to a song by Shiina Ringo at the time and used a Line-of-Sight Name as a placeholder)

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top