"I am sorry, but I think many spend way too much time making something out of nothing. The story was laid out very well and I think for those that sit on the boards and use to ask the Bungie guys these same questions, the answers were pretty straigh forward. By the way, I lost interest in Halo after it was told that all of our Marathon finds in the game were placed there just for those of us that had been in the community since 94, 95."
Wow- have you ever missed the point. It's entirally about what WE think as opposed to what 'Bungie' thinks. I don't care what Bungie thinks. It's OUR game and universe now more so then it EVER WAS theres- look at all the time and complexity that's gone into it here: It's not about what the 'answer' is, it's about what it MIGHT BE.
Like any good novel or work of art- author's intent it only a slim factor of the peice. What we take away from it is infinately (pun people, work with me) more important.
As for the Halo connections- I don't think there are ANY direct links between the two- they're totaly different games in totaly different universes. I do think, however, that the INTENT in Halo is important to Marathon. For example; why is Halo so much more slick, advanced, modern then Marathon? I like to imagine it's becuase the next itteration of Marathon, had there ever been one, would have incorperated what became of Earth in the 2800s- and how advanced and refined that planet had become. In that sense, we can see Halo's human society from the 26th century as a replica, to an extent, of what Marathon's earth would have been like in the 29th century. The Cortana reference, specificaly- as an AI tempered in the same metal as Durandal and Joyuese has to be understood as meaning that Cortana is- in a way- like the next itteration of Durandal. Ie, while there is only one Rampant, satirical, witty, truly intelligent (read, one HUMAN AI), that is, Durandal, the humanity of his character was spawned, as we know, by a flaw. Rampacy. It would be in the interst of Computer Programers on Earth after the launch of the Marathon to, read, Keep working on reducing Rampancy depsite the "stable Rampant AI being the holy grail" of programers, since, it makes little sense to try to build something unubtanable. Durandal, as such, was a one in a million fluke. Cortana is the systimised, highly procsessed Artifical Stable Rampant AI. As in, if you could BUILD stable, rampant AIs, the Halo AIs would be exactly that- immitations of what Durandal became. They would be mass produced aritifical-artificail Intelligence. Simulations of a simulation.
Now, that very notion, no matter the fact that it has nothing- and certainly was not the intention of 'Bungie'- to do with the actaul story of either series; is amazing. The idea of building a computer to learn to replicate human thought- ie, to learn to think on its own- was so impossible to do in Marathon, that the next best thing was the obivious solution: an imitation of that.
