Let's Play Marathon, pt 1 - Arrival

I wrote a post a long time ago, before. Isn’t it so fun we know what that means? I stated the intention to play through my favorite video game, Bungie’s Marathon, and write about it from the artistic/literary perspective I bandy around so much. Unfortunately, ‘before’ became ‘during,’ and stuff got derailed. In spectacular, bridge-dynamiting fashion. I’ve decided it’s time to crawl out of the gulch. Let’s put this cryosleep colony ship in gear. Let’s play some Marathon.

somewhere in the heavens… they are waiting.

With that text in white against a black background, and an ominous rumbling drone, the journey begins. Marathon’s first chapter introduces itself with a simple splash screen.

It’s fine, I’m a leaf on the wind

I love how much this image conveys. A tiny shuttlecraft makes a hasty, frantic landing in the bay of a larger vessel. This image is the first example of a balance the game maintains from start to finish. It leaves you with questions - ‘What and where is this ship? What’s wrong? Where am I shuttling in from?’ - while still telling you what you need to know: something bad’s going down, and you’ve rushed here to help. You can begin dealing with your immediate problems as more information slowly drips in. Speaking of new information…

If it’s any consolation…

This is the first thing you see. An eerie corridor with no human life or activity, the threatening red marks of unknown movement on your motion tracker, and the green glow of a computer terminal bearing the words ‘U.E.S.C. Marathon.’ As you walk toward it, you hear strange chittering voices and are attacked by semi-humanoid, semi-insectoid soldiers.

Hey, before we do this, I have a quick question about the pyramids.

Their staves fling crackling electric orbs that flash the whole screen white when they hit you. You fight them off with your pistol and a nervously small amount of ammo, then log into the terminal so the game can sprinkle a few more crumbs of what the hell’s going on.

One day that green-on-black interface you like is going to come back in style.

We meet the first of our supporting cast: Leela, the AI. If you know Halo, here’s Cortana’s grandma. All of your communication with Leela - all of your communication with anyone that isn’t expressed through bullets - is in these terminals. Even though it’s all text, through the first few levels you get a good sense of Leela’s personality. You gain a comradeship and affection that the game knows how to use. This way, Marathon gives you morsels of personal contact without ever truly breaking your loneliness. Traversing the game’s corridors, the only humans you actually see are terrified crew members running for their lives, shouting a few canned phrases before either dying or escaping to somewhere else. The terminals are oases of connection in a vast, poorly lit realm of steel, plastic, and death. When you’ve been slugging and shooting through engine chambers and landing bays hearing only bizarre alien tongues and gunfire, the sight of that green glow is hope. Not just because it may mark the end of the level, but because it lets you feel a little less alone for a precious minute before the fight goes on.

Also, let’s take a moment to appreciate the phrase “All personnel are required to arm themselves and fight for their lives.” It’s an unholy mesh of official and personal. It reads like something a person would write off the cuff, but then edit to sound more consistent in tone. Like something a being that was designed by humans, to interact with humans, but that was not itself human, might compose.

The terminals are key to Marathon's standout magic. Each level has one at the start and one at the end, but all of them have extras scattered around. Signing into them gives you pieces of the broader story, whether through history lessons, information about the ship’s function, or excerpts delving more into science or philosophy. The writing will swing between matter-of-fact, urgent, bombastic, and startlingly unsettling throughout the game, and I love it as a storytelling method. Partway through the first level, you find one with this text-

^^Fire and @3DC39 aspects of the theory are as follows: each society has some controlling force or forces which decide its direction, but the relationships in society are arbitrary-
humanity can relate to money, machines, neighbors, anything really; %6582@1

<logical reset @67FC229>
individual character and personality are preserved in stories, movies, Rom-personalities, etc; although individual expression is a universal ability, individual freedom is constrained by the society.(see attached figure)^^
*584F2E00206DFDCA7008C030780066C6202EFE4A

The U.E.S.C. Marathon is vast. A massive ship is an excellent setting for a game that came out when it did, before natural outdoor environments could be rendered all that convincingly by computer graphics. It allows for quick transitions between huge, cavernous spaces and mazes of tight corridors and narrow rooms. You traverse a ton of different environments while always knowing that you’re stuck inside a ship with hostile beings hounding you down, your back to the cold of space.

You’re also totally reliant on your AI companion to get from place to place. The Marathon is so big that you have to move from one level to the next via teleport pads, which the AI controls. The world shimmers and collapses around you, and you have to trust that when your destination snaps into being, the AI has sent you to where you’re supposed to go. You have to trust that that place hasn’t been torn out of the ship by the attack, that the deteriorating computer systems haven’t crossed the wrong signals the wrong way. That the teleporters are still controlled by who you think they are. Foreshadowing

The sublime mystery of the partly-open door.

Marathon’s first level shares its name with its chapter, ‘Arrival.’ It accomplishes an effective environment shift in a very short time. For the first half, you’re in decent-sized hallways and rooms with mostly good lightning. You hit a switch and open a narrow door, and all at once you’re in a claustrophobic warren, a dimly lit rat maze with sharp corners that anything might be lurking around.

…ello?

A caveat about my personal history with the game: Marathon has a MIDI soundtrack, but due to a quirk of the computer I originally played it on, I couldn’t run the game with music at the time. In later times, on later machines, I played through the game with the music on. However, that formative experience is how I first absorbed the game, and how I still prefer it. Having nothing in the background but eerie machine noises and the distant hum of the engines adds to the aloneness of it. That quiet also makes it even more creepy when you look around a corner in the rat maze part of Arrival and see this.

…

A spooky cloaked alien, which doesn’t look like the ones you’ve fought so far. It seems to be using one of the ship’s computer terminals, causing it to flicker unstably. When you kill it, it bursts into a cloud of static. There’s a wily casualness to the way the game places new mystery in your path. Once you reach the final terminal in Arrival, you learn just a bit more.

However disorderly the Alien invasion is, their assault of the Computer Net has been extremely effective. I detect security breaches in almost every computer system onboard the Marathon; I have learned that there is an Alien creature that is capable of interfacing with our systems.

You must kill any of these creatures that you find. It is a priority that we stop them. Even now, they are penetrating my defenses.

Now that we’ve been thrown into the desperate defense of our ship, I’m going to leave it there. We’ve got many more levels to explore and discuss, and so many little nooks and crannies to ponder about. See you next time.

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