Hey everyone, my name's Max Lieberman, and I, uh, kinda wrote much of the actual text for Marathon Rubicon. Scott and I initially collaborated on the plot (a synthesis of several scenarios which had been abandonded), but he ended up doing most of the plotting, and I worked from his instructions in writing the terms themselves. Some of it got reworked after I was through with it, of course. For most of the time I was working on Rubicon, my beta of the application itself was corrupted, so I was working blind. That was fun; it was a huge rush to see the final game come out and get such a response. I'm writing now because I hadn't been to the Story Page in a while, and now that I'm here there's all this good discussion about Rubicon happening, discussion that I missed the first time around. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I'm glad some people liked my Durandal, and I'm sorry to those who didn't. Keep in mind that I wrote most of this stuff when I was in 8th-11th grade, and I didn't have much experience writing fiction. I did my level best to plaigarize Kirkpatrick's Durandal accurately... ;P
I'll leave you all with a bit of trivia. I got into the Rubicon project after being flamed on alt.games.marathon for writing an ill-thought out post ripping the quality of the 3rd party scenarios that had been released to date (this was like, right after Tempus Irae came out -- Evil had been out for a while, though, and I think I was really hard on it). People basically told me to shut up and write my own scenario, which they were right to do. I was being a snotnosed little brat. So without the community -- Forrest C., Svywranth, the Battle Cat, Courtney, Steve from the archives, Hamish, etc. -- Rubicon might never have happened. Or at least someone else would have had to write it.
Check out the new google newsgroup archives, guys. That thread and many other more interesting ones from the Golden Age of Marathon discussion (let's face it guys, Bungie's been bought out and most of the games' "mysteries" have been solved) are now easy to access.
Thanks to Scott and Chris and everyone else who made Rubicon happen, and thank you guys for playing it.
Max Lieberman
P.S. Just out of curiosity and to stoke/deflate my ego, were there any terms that people particularly liked or disliked in Rubicon? I was always proud of the "color of hate" term, even if it was a little bit over the top.
