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Entry: 2 - Marathon Game and Community
Category: {General}
Tags: {games, community, definitions}

I recently just came out from under a rock, and to my excitement I
discovered that Bungie game studio had released a trailer for a game
which is based on their original Marathon Trilogy.

My first encounter with Marathon was during my school years in the
mid 2000s. By the time I was playing the trilogy, it was just over a
decade old and all the buzz with my school friends revolved around
Halo 3. I didn't have an xbox 360, but I did have access to the family
pc. Upon getting home, I'd jumped down the stairs to the basement and
launch M1A1, the Marathon 1 port for the Aleph One engine. Come
nighttime, I'd wake up around 12am, once everyone was fast asleep,
tiptoe down the basement steps, establish an internet connection via
dial-up, and launch Marathon Infinity. There, I'd wait in the online
chatroom for someone to start up a multiplayer game, which was usually
"King of the Hill" or "Every Man for Himself". It was a small
community, and it was around this time at night that the regulars would
connect. After 2am or so, I'd disconnect and tiptoe back to my room for
a few more hours of sleep.

Not all of my nights weren't spent playing Marathon Infinity. Some were
spent downloading third party scenarios such as the beloved Rubicon X.
I was using dial-up, so the downloads had to occur at night where I
could stay connected without my mother yelling at me to disconnet. (I
had not yet discovered the wonders of partial downloads via curl, or 
even linux for that matter.)

I have very fond memories of this time. I'd interact with the regulars,
some of whom were already veterans. I spent time in aleph one's online
chat room, chat via aleph one's freenode irc channel, read massive
amounts of info from the story page, or post on the pfhorums. The flame
wars on the pfhorums were in a word, "glorious", and thankfully, they
are saved in the "Legends" pfhorum. In the intro post for Legends,
the member irons put it best:
"In after-days, I would speak to W'rkncacnter, Ryoko, and Wolfy about
these threads as though they were part of a golden age, long-forgotten
even though they often exhibited our nastier sides."

Yes, the nostalgia is really coming back to me! After many years in
this community, I remember a few friends (and enemies) leave the
community, and eventually I got too busy that I disappeared as well.
It's been so long since and being that I've gone through at least two
handles within that time, I can't say that I'm much a part of that
community anymore and none of the members would know of who I am.

Still, for the last 15 years I've dreamt on and off of trying my hand
at creating a Marathon remake in a more modern engine. I've even
attempted at various times to create a novel marathon scenario to give
back to the community, but I never got the projects off the ground.

Anyway, this brings me up to now. I recently went on youtube and
searched for the trailer of the new Marathon game, and to my 
astonishment I encountered the most obnoxious piece of shit that I've 
seen recently. The "art style" was that of what can only be 
derogatorily called "visual dubstep." There is nothing "Marathon" 
about it except for the title.

The trailer seems to be a big hit for many video game players of
Destiny and other such games, yet my old Marathon community is strangly
quiet on Bungie's direction for the most part. There are a few veteran
members who have spoken out about it, and their viewpoint is basically
the same as mine. It's not what we want. On the whole, every one else
from the original community acts as though this new "Marathon" game 
simply does not exist. And I understand why.

Now many new members are entering the existing community with a
radically different interest and desire than those that have nutured
and sustained the Marathon Trilogy since they were first produced.

The solution to these radically different elements seems to have been
to split the community up between the "boomer" members who don't want
such a radical change to the community they've been a part of for 20+
years and those new members who seem to like to get off to this new
visual dubstep diarrhea nonsense. 

I guess my point is that such a difference between the new "Marathon"
and original Marathon cannot exist together within one community. It
shouldn't be too suprising. If a part of a group decides that they
want to play baseball, but the other part wants to play hockey, so
these two parts go their separate ways to play their respective games
and hang out with those playing their games, do you really have a 
single integral group?

We need limits - boundaries that define what something is or isn't.
This new "Marathon" game has no footing with the original trilogy, and
so the old members will continue onwards with aleph one, the remnants
of fileball, the pfhorums and its glorious shenanigans, while the new
members carve out a space to consume the new content produced by 
Bungie.

Perhaps it's time for me to dig back into my storage archive and pluck
out my old scenario files. I can't wait for some old friends to tear me
a new one over my stupid design decisions.

Regardless of what I do, I'll see you starside...

#### Page Created: 2023-10-06 ############ Last Edited: 2023-10-06 ####