ah yes, my yearly marathon preview. Ah marathon my beloved.

You forgot that Noelle never meets ralsei

I think Leela might act the way she does in relation to the cyborg stuff because she does have the information in her databanks but she is prevented from consciously accessing that data by limits on her programming. It would explain why she seems to immediately to put all her faith in you and why she doesn't realise that you're the last cyborg.

Great video!

hope to see more videos like this soon. and yeah, kinda annoying with destiny trying to take bits of a long gone game series. not looking forward to that reboot or whatever it is of this series either. one of my greatest fears, seeing marathon get butchered for the modern age. shid, too bad it didn't happen back in the 00's or early 2010's. at least it would have had a shot at being good maybe? most games these days just outright suck and that whole extraction shooter nonsense is dumb. though, the starship troopers extermination beta was pretty kino. was playing that a lot last summer, but as development progressed the game got worse and more buggy.

Wonderful video, Foxy, thank you

What's marathon? Just kidding, great video!

Is it just me or is Kris kinda a jackass? Like it makes me kind glad we are allegedly making his life miserable tbh. Like if you don’t like Ralsei than screw you I’ll do it for you.

As a note, kris gives a confused response when choosing anyone except suzie, not just ralsei. But yeah I see the less hp from ralsei as Kris having feelings of inferiority with their brother, which still lingers a little bit even on ralsei, and ralsei healing 50 from noelle is just telephone

Marathon wasn't merely the one that set the groundwork for Halo: Halo IS Marathon.

Regardless, where Microsoft/343 went with Halo and with how Bungie handed Destiny (most of the devs that worked on Halo left long ago and being quietly dismantled by Sony now). One bullet was dodged to be hit by another. Halo and Marathon are remnants of two different eras in history. Halo just become a soulless brand. Marathon is just a nostalgic name Bungie's pulling out of mothballs now that the Destiny grift has ran its course.

lolz@look there's a marathon logo

Bungie trying to remake Marathon is even more "backwards" than them trying to go back to Halo. It's like, they want to make Halo again, but they can't, due to selling the rights to Microsoft.

Awesome video Fen!!

Always love hearing more about Marathon, its such an interesting game.

6:23 I can feel my finger twitching watching that Halo CE plasma pistol gameplay 😅

Well done 👏👏👏

"for a brick he flew pretty good!" lmao

Thank you KZbin home page

This is great

amazin

Sgt. Johnson is the best

That postgame lobby was a stroke of genius

bruh idk how this got to my feed but its the perfect level of stupid I needed today. Nice work. *bomb taken*

Not my first synopsis I've seen of this game, but every time I do hear it, it keeps my rapt attention - and I feel renewed second-hand indignation that current Bungie decided to call a freemium multiplayer online shooter 'marathon'.

Love that you went with the old school HUD, good video!

all the cope and sneed from the halo fanboys, lel. i wonder how many actually played the marathon games? i assume not many, it's breddy obvious the games aren't connected despite "MUH MuLtIvErSe" cope everyone tries to use in every franchise now since those shitty marvel movies came out. i think it's evident enough that any references to marathon in halo are mostly just nods and fan service to the old fans. the games are similar yes, and i would argue that halo CE was really just a re-imagining of the marathon series with bungie being able to do what they weren't able to do in the mid 90s with series. it eventually turned more into it's own thing, but the marathon games were really good for the time, it worked well so might as well port it over into a new game for a new generation of consoles. besides, it was obscure being limited to the mac (aside from M2) compared to it's fps counterparts of that era, doom, duke nuke'em and so on. always drove me nuts though, n00bs learning of the marathon series and trying to fit it in with halo, it's been going for ages now. nothing wrong with the two games being totally separate but similar and the fact that halo took much from the core dna of marathon, down to story and even game design. halo was just reboot of the classic mac fps for a new generation to discover and enjoy. >marathon enjoyer since 1995

Doom might have been the first major FPS, but Marathon did story first. I forgot how good it was, love to see it again

Marathon is such an incredible series especially for the time. I try to play the series every 5 years or so, it’s also a shame that Bungie is most likely going to completely butcher the remake

I think Myth was a large influence on Halo as well, in its militaristic tone, wide open naturalistic environments, gameplay elements like the “golden triangle” of melee, ranged weapons, and grenades, and story elements like the Flood being similar to the Fallen Lords (an army of undead lead by an ancient being.)

Halo was originally debuted at the 1999 Mac Expo, running on a Macintosh under the title marathon (Marathon4)… it was at this Expo that Bill Gates bought bungee, forever changing the story arch

This has really given me the kick in the pants to go play the marathon games. I've been playing the new Doom port and I just finished Blood for the first time, it'll be interesting to see how they compare

In Bungie's canon, rampancy in AI is much closer to how its portrayed in Marathon where an AI reaches full sentience and behaves just like humans, as well as their pitfalls. This is what happens to Mendicant Bias, and how it's explained in Contact Harvest too The golden (sometimes white) secret elites in Reach were also called BOBs

In post Bungie Halo, there still are some cool references/observations you can find in the series (even if they aren't as concrete). An example is the security helmet in Infinite, which was specifically designed to locate/defend locations against A.I. Another example is lore about the Drinniol/Sharquoi. In Marathon, it is mentioned that a Phfor scientist tried to implement a cybernetic implant into the species but failed. In Halo, the Foreunners did the same thing but were successful. A last example is some Halo Infinite concept art of The Harbringer, depicting her wearing a cloak that gives her a striking resemblance to the S'pht.

The fact that Halo follows so closely the formula they used for Marathon makes the new Marathon being an extraction shooter feel even worse. I was hoping against all hope when I first heard about Marathons reboot that it would be like halo. With a campaign, multiplayer, firefight style mode. I’m just hoping whatever story it has is good

I FUCKING LOVE MARATHON!!!!!!!

Marathon would’ve flourished and been remembered universally as one of the greats if it was on windows. Multiplayer had many of the things that halo brought mainstream. Being on mac gave it the label now as “ahead of its time” because most gamers didn’t experience it. I love doom and marathon for different reasons but Marathon definitely excelled in storytelling and multiplayer which unfortunately wasn’t a huge thing until the early 2000 for the average player.

Same. I think that the moral message of Undertale is slightly warped and corrupted, instead of sparing people who DO deserve to be spared and trying to be understanding, the game feels more like the character is some kind of a martyr who should be okay with being mistreated and treated like trash. *ESPECIALLY* Undertale Yellow where in true pacifist Clover acts like a holy martyr, even though Undertale Yellow isn’t canon but it still has that warped message that being a punching bag is okay somehow. And about the reset thing, maybe Frisk does know about resets, but in Undertale Yellow, Clover *doesn’t know about resets* so to them, they’re literally just a mortal child who got one life to live, which makes it even more effed up. AND it’s can be especially seen in Yellow where Clover decides to protect themselves against a ROBOT and they get scolded by Ceroba for literally just fighting for their life, if that’s not hypocrisy i don’t know what is And also knowing the fact that the main characters still feel pain it’s absurd that you have to endure something like being burned alive to spare someone who doesn’t regret in the slightest to end your life. But oh well, we still have to spare monsters even though they would be *completely fine* with locking all humans underground once they get out

Don't comment a lot, so I'll toss one your way to appease the algorithm. Only got past the Resi part of the video, but I appreciate your commentary on how integral resource management is for survival horror, still mixed on limited saves, but that's just how it goes with people who have different tastes and tolerances for vidya game mechanics.

Hopefully the new Marathon isn't woke.

I noticed the "O" in Halo also has a small Marathon logo but sideways. Also this makes me wonder, is Halo CE not actually Halo 1?? 🤔

Had to stop the video not even halfway through to say "holy shit this is the best video I've watched in a minute". Just started playing Halo again after years and this really brought me back to reading "The Art of Halo" on Christmas morning. Just wanted to say I'm glad I found your channel, and thanks for the super nostalgic vibe all around! Definitely got me inspired to do something of my own again.

Marathon was what made Halo possible, similar to how Halo Reach was what made Destiny possible... (ie OG Bungie tested new features in their established franchises before jumping to a new franchise to figure out what works)

I wouldn't say Marathon didn't leave its mark on the gaming industry. It was THE reason to game on Apple Mac. It was Apple's response to DOOM on Microsoft PCs. It didn't "inspire" mostly because it wasn't all that different from DOOM/Quake in the first place. The only things it largely did that DOOM didn't was a heavy focus on story and momentum. Momentum didn't stick around too much outside of Halo mostly as it wasn't as simplistic. But the heavy story focus of Marathon became very prominent, making its way into Half-Life and basically every game nowadays.

The Marathon logo was ALWAYS the symbol of Reclaimer in Halo. Even in the Bungie games. In Halo: Contact Harvest (written by the lead Halo writer, released in 2008), the Covenant see Harvest covered in upside-down Marathon logos on their Forerunner luminary device that shows Forerunner relics. But when the three prophets speak to Mendicant Bias, he calls them idiots, tells them that they've mistranslated, flips the glyph upside down to show the Marathon logo as we know and love, before explaining to them that it doesn't mean "Reclamation", it means "Reclaimer" and those it represents are its makers (AKA Forerunners/Humans). It was never only a UNSC symbol, it was always a HUMANS symbol, which is why it was always all over Human and Forerunner things everywhere, as you even pointed out all of the Forerunner places/things that contain the Marathon logo.

Mendicant Bias' rampancy process is the exact same as Marathon's rampancy. Mendicant Bias was specifically already in the first stage of Melancholy because of his position basically dictating which Forerunners get to live and which ones die. The Flood tricked him into the second stage of Anger, and aimed him at his makers, the Forerunners, to get him to the Flood's side. And at the end of it all in the present day, when he speaks to Master Chief directly, he's gained his metastability and has reached true selfawareness/personhood. That's why throughout the terminals, Mendicant Bias is referred to as "it" but when he speaks to you directly at the end, Mendicant Bias goes by "he" and such.

13:49 The Covenant don't really have almost ANY AI's on purpose because AI's were the downfall of the Forerunners. Which, ironically, the AI responsible for that IS the AI that Cortana is referencing in this dialogue. She's not up against a Covenant AI, she's up against a Forerunner AI.

I feel like the Ralsei-Noelle thing can be easily explained. Noelle has no idea Ralsei even exists until nearer the end of the chapter and thus, having no idea that he exists results in her seeïng the cup as empty. Ralsei DOES know Noelle exists, as he sees her getting caged by Queen and taken away, and also sees how Kris & Susie care about Noelle. From Ralsei’s perspective, for Kris & Susie to care about Noelle she must be quite a sweet person, hence the reäction to the tea: it’s from his assumptions before fully seeïng her personality (which is also why the reäction is quite weak)