: I am curious if anyone knows much info about the Fungal Zombies that were
: going to be in Marathon 2. I saw them from the concept are on bungie.net
: but never learned anything about them. They appear to be something like
: the flood in Halo. Does anyone know much else?
They are the predecessor concept to the Flood from Halo. Rob's been kicking that idea around for a long time.
Story was that the S'pht had released some sort of biological weapon (which was later revised in the story to be the S'cl'tar or whatever they call it, the old S'pht virus that keeps the Pfhor out from Robert Blake's underground camp in M2). This biological weapon I guess was something fungal, going by the name "Fungal Zombie", which turned the things it infected into... zombies, of some sort. For some reason.
They dropped the concept because it made no sense that the hyper-intelligent S'pht Olders would engineer something that would make their enemies into nigh-unstoppable undead monsters instead of just KILLING THEM, which is what they finally revised the S'pht virus to do. In M2 as it stands the virus was only released underground and only during the last stages of the invasion, as the Olders huddled beneath the Citadel trying to decipher the last message of the S'pht'Kr. That's why there's no Pfhor underground, just their cyborg slaves (the virus targets Pfhor biology specifically), and why Robert Blake and his men are safe hiding underground except from the same cyborg slaves, and the simulacrums. (Which I guess raises the interesting point that Blake & co are hiding somewhere under the Citadel, doesn't it?)
Something like Fungal Zombies were/are scheduled to appear in Eternal chapter 5, if I can ever get somebody to finish making the sprites for it. (I had Maarten "•M" Tromp working on one of the types, before he vanished off the face of the net). That's what the weird grey Pfhor were stand-ins for in Eternal Mk V.
