unforum

[ubersaurus]

[Marathon]neat article on Bungie's history of FPS design

[Anton P. Nym]

Marathon could be argued to be a predecessor of ARGs, really. C'mon, steganography in a video game? Slam-dunk! The arcane plot and the "find the terminals" reveal method for that plot also help it out too.

The Marathon-esque "Cortana Letters" also teeter on the brink of ARG-dom.

-- Steve reminds folks that the Marathon trilogy is freeware now if you're at all interested.

[krystyn]

Hee, I actually helped Nova with the fact-checking for the ILB/Rampancy subsection of that Escapist article. She's way, way cool.

(not NovaNZ, btw. A completely different and yet still totally awesome Nova!)

[novab]

It's all about finding the experts...

~ nb

[ThaJinx]

[CherryMay]

Curiously enough, I actually started playing Marathon last night, due to a chain of ARG-related researching... (Seeing the origenxbox360 page, remembering ilovebees, looking through wikipedia entry about it, and eventually finding out that marathon was released as freeware).

I'm around half-way through the game so far, and I'm absolutely loving it... I'm not usually keen on FPS games at all, but in Marathon, you seem to spend as much time reading terminals as running around. The way the messages are presented is very clever too... the 'rampant' AI is very entertaining to hear from, so to speak.

It's also the first game I've seen where I've really been captured by the background story in the manual... it's as thought-provoking as the AI messages in-game.

People often don't believe me when I say that I play some games for their plots alone, but Marathon is a perfect example of one which I truly do!