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am I the only one that thought of the marathon map, not the movie when I read that?

Great map. I think they even ported it to unreal tournament.

Heck, I had no idea there was a movie by that name until now :)

Looks like someone (ie Bungie) is staging a rampancy. Rampacy is what happened to the AI's in the Marathon game. Ie they broke lose from the safeguards imposed on them and went wild. The new black box looks very very similar to the console info in the original Marathon games when Durandel went wild. Bungie has a highly evolved back story for their universe very similar to Larry Nivens known space universe. Niven also wrote the book Ringworld, in which more then a little bit of Halo cribs from. Halo = ringworld. If I remember correctly back from the original marathon back story we are right about the time the first AI went rampant, on earth. I think it was an accidentle ai not created by man but from the interconnectedness of computers. AI's have always featured prominantly in Bungie games as plot conveyers, and info distributers. Here is partial list of Marathon backstory, that also ties into Bungies first fps title "Pathways into Darkness"
AI history
It is imcomplete but does give some more info. Bungie has admitted that Halo fits in the Marathon/Pathways universe but until now has not tied it together. Many insignias and parts of the game are stolen from Marathon. A good discussion on Marathon/Halo connections
I have always been a Marathon fan as I have mention in previouse posts, as many game play feature predated many pc fps titles for a few years. Unreal Tourny did not invent king of the hill, tag, or kill the man with the ball. These had been around on Marathon for a few years. Bungie also allowed people to mod the games and gave tools out to make maps change graphics, and physics way before people started modding games on pc's. It is unfortunate that one of the most ground breaking FPS titles was on the MAC and gets so little recognition. I still lode up marathon games sometimes and reveal in the map design and story. I feel as well as most people that have played the marathon series that Half-life's story line and maps pale in comparison to what Bunigie did on 1995-1999.

Just my rant...

The Cortana letters..

The Cortana letters preceeded Halo by several years, originating on Newsgroups and touching on some of the game lore of Marathon.

People have already been tracking all things Bungie for a long time. You don't need no stinking new fangled Wiki.

Frankly, Bungie has a history of hiding details you need to search for and research... Both in their game stories(primarily Marathon, the semi-parent of Halo), and also in their 'buzz generation' for games.

A long time ago, back in the pre-Halo release days(in fact, before the anouncement of exactly what the project that wound up being Halo was made official), there was an entire series of quirky odd referenced 'fake e-mails' to the person who runs an important fansite... You can see some details here.

Speaking of Marathon it is now in open source and can be reached at Bungie

A contest for speedrunning Halo for Xbox has just concluded, with a total time of 2:15:15. It's probably possible to do better, this was the first real attempt at it.

You may not see the influence, but it's there. It's akin to keeping in mind that Miles Davis studied classical musicians at Julliard - you don't need to know Beethoven to appreciate Davis's work, but Davis's work wouldn't be the same without that influence.

You didn't have to play the games for my argument to be valid. The designers of the games you played on the PC had to play the Mac games.

Marathon

Better than Quake, miles ahead of Doom, and probably the scariest game I've ever played.

Well, this isn't exactly real, but just think if someone could come up with a good idea for this movie. That would be pretty rad. :-)

Halo: The Movie.

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Look what's out there. In one way or another, the market is dominated by killing simulations.

That, my friend, has little to nothing to do with engineers writing code. It's because that's what sells. There have been no shortage of games that were quite different, had artistic merit, weren't bloodfests, and flopped in the marketplace (one of my favorite examples: The Longest Journey. That's what society (well, US society) wants.

So then we ask ourselves -- why is this what society wants?

The main source of glamorizing killing is not, to my way of thinking, video games. It's Hollywood, which has been doing action movies forever, and instilled a good solid bloodlust in the market. Yeah, those "art and humanities" people that are supposed to wisely steer engineers.

Of course, the real root of all this is that violence is exciting because it gets our blood moving -- it's an easy mechanism to use to sell things. But the black turtleneck types were where violent media became popularized for the mass market in the US. The pocket-protector types do not deservve that blame.

It's a religion of polygon counts and frames per second.

Because the largest detracting factor from the terrifying experience of *actually being in such an environment* is how inaccurate current graphics systems are at reproducing such an environment. It's being frantically worked on by many companies.

The commercial text adventure, the literature of the games industry, is long dead.

The IF industry isn't dead -- there's still the occasional commercial release. Lack of IF content producers is not the problem. Have you *played* the amateur games out there? They go much further than the Zorks of yesteryear. The reason that commercial IF has fallen to such a low simmer is that:

(a) current amateur content is so good that it is very difficult to enter the market.

(b) People don't like *thinking* for entertainment. Books have been crucified by movies and TV as a form of entertainment, and the same thing happened in the video games realm. Dead tree authors and TV producers are not the "hard sciency" types that you claim are at fault, and the same thing happens in that arena, and on a far larger scale.

Games with meaningful inter-personal communication are impossibly rare.

Right. This has, if anything, to do with a *lack* of computer science researchers in the game field. It is *extremely* difficult to simulate a human to even a basic conversational level, and to do so effectively is beyond the best of our science. If you want to have interpersonal relationships, you require conversation capable of evoking emotion -- truly *human*-sounding responses. We are not there yet.

And try to name a game that displays more than a passing interest in any the humanistic studies--literature, history, philosophy and, arguably, religion.

Heck, my favorite FPS does that -- take a look at some of the Marathon Story site. You'll find a number of uses of literature and history, and philosophy. Religion doesn't show up much, though. Here's a sample subset: Shakespeare, Lovecraft , Beowulf (a bit dubious). There are references to mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Nordic), The Song of Roland (also see this, use of Latin, and so forth.

The problem is that society as a whole does not seem to be interested in literate entertainment when there is much easier-to-deal-with simple entertainment. Further, efficiency of production of content ri

Read about Myth here
You can play Myth: The Fallen Lords here
You can play Myth II and Myth III here.

Go here for Marathon.

Read about Myth here
You can play Myth: The Fallen Lords here
You can play Myth II and Myth III here.

Go here for Marathon.

Bungie's Macintosh masterpiece from the mid 1990's.

The story was deep, multi-threaded, and enjoyable to discover via the game. The DOS-boys were just shooting/killing with Doom, but those of us blessed to drive a Mac were really getting into a fine storyline while were participated in wholesale slaughter. Yeah, we even did it with one-button mice!

Huge, well researched websites exist just to study the *storyline* of the original game.

If you want the two page "Cliffs Notes" version, it is here, though it pales in comparison to the actual multi-threaded reality (or is it fantasy?) =)

Bungie's Macintosh masterpiece from the mid 1990's.

The story was deep, multi-threaded, and enjoyable to discover via the game. The DOS-boys were just shooting/killing with Doom, but those of us blessed to drive a Mac were really getting into a fine storyline while were participated in wholesale slaughter. Yeah, we even did it with one-button mice!

Huge, well researched websites exist just to study the *storyline* of the original game.

If you want the two page "Cliffs Notes" version, it is here, though it pales in comparison to the actual multi-threaded reality (or is it fantasy?) =)

Max Payne 2's storyline was pretty good, but it got downright pretentious at moments, trying for an emotional depth that the characters just didn't deserve. And you can forget about subtlety.

No, the best storyline I've ever seen in a game is the Marathon series from Bungie. They've been out for over 9 years, and people are still discovering new depths to the story after all this time.

I very much agree with you. I would love to see some of the larger battles that were referenced in the game adapted to film. I also like the thought of following "The Five Champions" in their adventures, but that would probably be too close to the Lord of the Rings.

Bungie's Marathon also has a wonderful storyline that may work well on the big screen. Of course, I know nothing about writing scripts and whatnot, so I could be completely incorrect.

I've always maintained a movie based on the story of the first two games in the Myth series would make GREAT movies. Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter. Heck, some fans of the game even did a fan-fiction movie of it using iMovie.... with no budget mind you. Avon's Hope: A Myth Movie

AFAIK, they first made the joke on April Fools 2001 . MS purchased them in June of 2000. Is is very possible the joke goes back much further than the website, though I can find no evidence of it (and it would make a poor April Fools joke if so). Any linkage I should be aware of?

(Google cache of the currently unavailable offical page here)

That reminds me of everyone's favorite game's dreams. Spoilers, but if you don't know already, you probably weren't going to do so:

Well, there was this knife, more aptly described as a broadsword, and I see, well, I was swinging down the street on my way to a movie and this guy, yeah. He was about six foot eight and huge. He was holding this knife, only to me, I would describe it as a broadsword, something from the Knights of the Round. Before he can even open his mouth, he collapses. Meanwhile, I can barely lift a finger to put the toupee back on his glossy head because I'm shaking so much.

He was vomiting and I knew that he was alive because he kept saying something like 'durability' between convulsions. What happened next was really bizarre. Both ends of the street flood with black-suited men, just like in a movie.

These men look tough and pissed off, the eyes behind their sunglasses are probably cold as my hands are getting. I feel like my heart has stopped, I'm so damn scared. As they start to inundate the street in black, they move with one will.

I figure that I'm dead anyway, so I reach down for the blade. The blade is being covered by his vomit, but the hilt is clean. I can hear the men getting excited, but I can't stop. My fingers slide around the leather hilt which is oddly cold...

terminal end

I'm in the same street, and as I reach into my pocket for my keys, my eyes follow the blackened streaks of gum that pock-mark the sidewalk. The man is gone, and someone in sanitation cleaned up the aparitions and vomit in a real hurry. I hurry down the stairs heading for the subway, but my keys aren't in my pocket anymore. I'll have to get in through the side window.

The subway station is very bright and shining from the sanitation team that has been sweeping a swath in front of me. The concrete floor is losing years of tarnish, keeping only the protective layer of the gum streaks which make up constellations in an otherwise vacant sky.

The train arrives right on time, and just ahead of a mass of dark suited men who have been following me for what seems like years now. Between the sanitation and the suits, I must be going colorblind, but the train is here now, and those men, no, they won't catch me...

terminal end

and

Seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses float inconspicuously around the inside of hangar ninety six. I say that they are inconspicuous because it is their arms and legs which demand my attention. I did this, or I could have stopped it. Which is it? It doesn't matter now. I did this and could have stopped it, but nothing in nature ever follows a gaussian curve. Sure, they'll tell you that it does. They say that every five minutes someone dies in a car accident, but how often are there seven hundred and sixty one armless and legless corpses in one hangar?

You'll find that the smaller rings as well as many other aspects of Halo bear a strong resemblance to the Culture universe of Iain M. Banks. A more detailed comparison here.

"Even if the universe was going to end, IBM's R&D would probably to develop a method to transport itself to an alternate dimension."

I'm quite confident that before the universe collapses, we'll see the next coming of Steve Jobs, and he'll save the faithful by using his reality-distortion-field to shift everyone into another dimension.

He might even run into Durandal
"The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath.
And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
Escape will make me God."

in "Optional" mature content. How many awesome games were NOT sold due to some kid's parents saying it was too violent/had too much cussing/etc?

I understand that some people want "mature" content in their video games. But make it optional. Call of Duty has the blood as an optional setting. Halo: Combat Evolved does too, at least in the pc version, albeit disguised as "texture quality".

My suggestion is to have options like so in all video games, with a few exceptions, of course. Let the end user decide if he wants the gore. Cussing, naturally, isn't as easy to censor optionally, and I see no reason to have two different meshes for all female characters... one in the bikini, the other mesh with full-length dress, that's just nonsense. ;)

Is "Mature" necessary to the video game industry? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that some gamers won't buy games unless they have "mature" content in them, but no in the sense that a game has to have "mature" content or it won't sell well.

Of course, you know they're playing Halo and just want their own Master Chief...

I think that if I had to summarize the reason Marathon's story made such a huge impression on everyone (and spawned the massive Marathon Story) site and many thousands of posts of sophisticated discussion in two words, I'd use "subtle" and "deep".

Marathon made a number of very subtle, minor allusions, clues to figuring out the full story. It did not come out and simply say "Durandal is a bad computer who is insane. You need to work with him." or something like that. It let you discover the plot as you went through tidbits dropped. You couldn't just read the story by going through the terminals and appending one to another -- each is a non-chronologically sequential piece of information that generally fits into the story somehow. It's quite Myth-like, though with a far more complex story.

Marathon's plot is very deep for such a subtle one -- there are a *phenomenal* number of references to literature, history, mythology, contemporary weapons technology, psychology, etc, that you need to look up to understand fine points of what the authors were getting at. You might find yourself reading a news article on the sociology of a Martian political group that gives some insight into the background of what happend and the reason things occurred. Because it took such expertise to figure the story out, it spawned a vast number of (sometimes occasional) players who wrote interesting analyses from their own area of expertise to help the community figure out what Bungie had written.

Even better, you didn't *have* to pay attention to the story if you didn't want to. You weren't forced to rely on the story much to figure out what to do in the game. You could play Marathon as a straight action game if you wanted to, and weren't interested in the story, but if you wanted to get into the story, it was appealing and there. This made the game appealing to a broad audience.

If I could choose two more elements, probably less important, that made Marathon good, it would be darkness and plausibility.

The Marathon comments were frequently very dark (a trend that progressed as the series continued). They referred to deaths and killings quite seriously. They referenced massacres and insanity, and not in a offhandish way in the least. They also did not generally say "someone is insane" -- they let you figure it out for yourself, by reading their thoughts or what happened. One of the darkest is the infamous Gheritt White terminal. This is one of the darkest and most disturbing texts that I think I've ever read in a video game -- much more intimidating than the short and violence-glorifying snippits in Postal. That single terminal alone spawned *vast* amounts of discussion and analysis. When elements in Marathon II and Infinity (like the pocketknife/broadsword terminal) start their own story threads that start out reasonable and get darker, you can really feel a kind of shocked surprise. If you're playing by yourself, late at night and in the dark, (and have just survived creeping through dark hallways with silent things drifting down them and around corners and out of the darkness) your words are probably much like mine -- "Oh, *man*". The only games that I think have competed with Marathon in terms of slowly, horrifyingly uncovering what happened are adventure games -- like Myth -- and I've yet to see an adventure game with the subtlety of Marathon.

Marathon is also plausible. There were, to be fair, errors. However, Marathon's story underwent the most extensive analysis I've ever seen a story undergo. I doubt that books undergo such work, especially given the size of the crowd looking for errors. Like Snow Crash, much of the computer technology in the series is at least acceptably plausible. Real terms are used, references to current technologies are used. It means that programmers don't have to constantly wince when playing the game, which is truly wonderful and unusual for a st

If you have access to a Mac, you might consider giving Marathon/Aleph One map-making a try. Marathon uses a "2.5D" engine, somewhat like Doom or Duke Nukem, and is absurdly easy to design for. There's a fairly extensive library of maps available at bungie.org, including some really impressive "total conversion" projects (all maps, graphics, and sounds replaced). The only caveat is that the best tools for Marathon are available only for Macs, and work best on OS 9 at that. There are some projects to get tools going for OS X, and there is a map editor called Obed for Windows, but I have no idea if it's any good.

I suspect that only a minority of Slashdot-ers will recognize what I'm talking about, but any game in the trilogy deserves a remake on it's own; the whole trilogy deserves a remake, even more.

Lucky for us, that's already in the works. In fact, it's being simultaneously ported for Linux and Windows as well as OS X, AND it's an Open Source project. If I had any programming skills (alas, I don't), I'd be in on the project. As it stands, I'll have to wait until Pfhorge (pronounced "forge," for the uninitiated) comes out to make any contribution.

Anyhow, for those interested, the project is called Aleph One; the main site can be found here, and the SourceForge site can be found here.

~UP

*ahem*

a couple others have been done too, iirc, the SPNKr, Pistol, and Sniper Rifle...

this one is the best, imo.. but the SPNKr is almost as good though..

Not only that, but even the HUD looks strangely similar. Now it also looks a little like the Jedi Knight HUD, but still. Take a look of various photos (and nifty other stuff) at: http://oni.bungie.org/onishots/

The best game soundtrack is definitely Halo. The launch menu, for example, is like a bunch of Tibetan monks doing their prayers or something. It's so serene, it's scary. And the in game music just pulls you into the game, chews you up, and spits you out.

There's a (proper, legitimate) MP3 of the Halo theme at halo.bungie.org - it's actually one of the reasons I bought the game when the PC port arrived.

I really like good game music, and this licensing of hit singles thing just bores me. I want something new, something utterly different.

Other people are listing games, so I might as well too. Here goes...

Quake, Homeworld, Homeworld 2, Halo, Half-Life (track 11 on the CD just says 'Half-Life' to me, and I love the game), System Shock 2...

I think it is ironic how this has all happened. I remember in high school having "LAN parties" at friends houses, to play the original WarCraft(Blizzard). We wouldn't tell people about it cause they would make fun of us if they heard about it.

Now, it seems like every guy and girl in town owns an XBox... and they get together once a week to network them together for gaming!? Suddenly its cool to spend an evening or weekend playing video games in mass!? I never thought I would see that day come! The funniest part is they seem to think this is new technology. "Wow, you can network the consoles together to play each other?" Yikes! I remember trying to setup a coax network to try to get a Marathon game going.

You should look for Aleph-One, which is a new implementation for the Marathon 2-engine. And there are also the files for Marathon 1 on Aleph one available for free.

Have a look at http://source.bungie.org/ A link to the Marathon-1 files is in one of the boxes on the right side.

I wonder if they've figured out the 3-D problem with Pac-Man. I made a Pac-Man level for the old Bungie game Marathon, and it's totally a different game in 3-D.

In the original game, you, as Pac-Man, can see the entire field, but in 3-D, you can only see some very narrow, cramped hallways. It's kind of frustrating, because there's no way to know what dots you've eaten, and you have no idea where the ghost-monsters will be coming from. Unless your Pac-Man's packing a rifle, you'll be dead just as soon as you saw the first ghost-monster. Not fun.

To an extent. From what I've been able to garner (with more than a little help from these people), it's a very tenuous connection (343 = 7*7*7, Marathon fans!).

Halo 2 is supposedly going to expand on the story in a big way, and will probably reinforce that connection (as well as - Bungie tell us - making us realise just how many Secret Clues were left around Halo. Oh well, any excuse to play the game again...)

Actually, Marathon is still around. Bungie open sourced it before Microsoft bought them. It's called Aleph One now.

Bah. Marathon is still the superior open-source engine!

Half Life 2? Way to try to bolster your agrument by including a game that's not even out for Windows machines yet.

RTCW? Yup.

C&C Generals? Yup, coming soon.

Halo? Yup, soon.

Sim City 4? Yup.

Civ III? Yup.

In conclusion, you need to take a break from the gaming and check your facts before you post. Otherwise you come off looking like a dumb shit when someone like me comes along to easily prove you wrong.

~Philly

A recent interview says the Mac version is still in the works.

Build a time machine and go back to murder whoever initiated the deal to purchase bungee, then buy it for the PC the way it was originally planned.

Bungie was one of the few Mac only game houses that produced good games for the mac all the way back to my first first person shooter, Marathon. Most people don't realize, but Halo was announced for the Mac. If you look here you can find links to the video of the premere of Halo for the mac at Macworld '99 New York. I was at that keynote when Steve Jobs introduced the 2 minute movie for Halo rendered using the game engine in real time, not pre recorded. I almost creamed my pants. I remember thinking to my self that this was the game that was finaly going to bring the Mac into the gaming arena. Even my PC using Mac bashing friend who I dragged with me was drooling over it. Alas, before it's Macintosh release, Microsoft bought out bungie and made them the "X-Box Development Team". That was a sad day for us Apple people all over. Bungie was known in the mac community as a top noch developer of mac games including one of our first first-person shooters, Marathon. At least you can still pick up the Bungie Mac Action Sack and try some of the awsome games this company once made for the macintosh.

The trailer I always thought was best wasn't actually an "official" trailer, but a short movie put together by a fan of the Oni game (from Bungie). It's made entirely of movie captures from the game and has a very fitting soundtrack. Being made by a fan, it captures the spirit of the game like few trailers our there ever did for their rspective games.

The trailer I always thought was best wasn't actually an "official" trailer, but a short movie put together by a fan of the Oni game (from Bungie). It's made entirely of movie captures from the game and has a very fitting soundtrack. Being made by a fan, it captures the spirit of the game like few trailers our there ever did for their rspective games.

The trailer I always thought was best wasn't actually an "official" trailer, but a short movie put together by a fan of the Oni game (from Bungie). It's made entirely of movie captures from the game and has a very fitting soundtrack. Being made by a fan, it captures the spirit of the game like few trailers our there ever did for their rspective games.

Actually this has been done, except with a standard wired connection!
Check out the High Speed Highway Halo video, it's pretty kewl, I'd like to try it sometime.