: It's amazing how this theme keeps coming up. Whether or not Halo started out
: as a Marathon sequel is pure conjecture. I personally don't believe this
: to be the case for the simple reason - why would Bungie have made a
: Marathon sequel at this point in time? Although development on Halo began
: some years ago, the original Marathon engine was already quite dated and I
: can't believe that any game developers in their right minds would create a
: new game that depended on newbies to go back and play an old game.
: Remember that Marathon is heavily driven by its story and there would be
: just too much story to convey at the beginning of Halo were this to be the
: case. On top of that, we have Bungie making it clear that the Halo
: Universe is not the Marathon Universe and it's pretty hard to see Halo as
: a sequel. Further, although there are many similarities, there are even
: more inconsistincies and incompatibilities that any pretense of Halo ever
: being considered as a sequel becomes too hard to swallow.
: Let's step out of the realm of rabbid gamers trying to find significance in
: arcane plot elements and step into the minds of the developers. You have a
: series of very successful games on your hands, but nothing nothing that
: has ever made the big time. There are fans to be sure, but the fanbase is
: limited, and most of them use Macs while the real gamers are on consoles
: and PC's. Although your more recent games have incorporated the latest in
: gaming technology and have been successful, Marathon remains the most
: entheusiastically embraced game you have ever done. You want to break into
: the greater gaming community and you want to build on your past successes,
: but you can't expect the market you hope to sell to to be familiar with
: your earlier games.
: I believe that in this frame of reference, Bungie chose to use Marathon as a
: foundation for the development of Halo, but not as its prequel. They took
: what they thought worked well in Marathon - FPS action, science fiction, a
: compelling story, AI's and battleroids, and simplified things to make it
: easier for the masses to get into gameplay. In many ways the Pfhor and
: their client races became the Covenent and instead of them being
: enslavers, they became religious fanatics bent on humanity's destruction.
: Since modern gamers had too short an attention span to be expected to read
: a bunch of backstory on a series of terminals, everything had to be
: conveyed through cutscenes. Beyond this, Halo and Marathon completely
: diverge. The fact that the Marathon symbol was incorporated into Halo is a
: nod to Bungie's past and nothing more.
Up to this point, I'm in 100% agreement with you. Nice analysis of the motivations, and I think you're spot-on with your conclusions.
: Don't get me wrong - Halo is a very nice game. It's a lot of fun, but I find
: the cutscenes to be an incredible distraction to gameplay and I find the
: action to be surprisingly tedious in spots. As I read in a recent review
: of Doom 3, much of Halo can be summarized as - enter room, kill all the
: monsters inside, enter next room. Marathon has so much more depth,
: particularly in the development of its story, that I'll never tire of it.
: That's whay I claim that Halo is a dumbed-down version of Marathon. I
: understand why Bungie made it this way, but it's hard to extol its virtues
: when we know how much better it could have been. The one thing Halo is not
: is a sequel to Marathon, nor was it ever likely meant to be.
Bah. I spent 6 or 7 years pretty heavily immersed in the Marathon storyline. I've spent the last 3 or 4 heavily immersed in the Halo storyline.
