: No one makes sense of the story until 5 years after its release, during the
: time it is finally finished off by it successor, Halo.
Personally I find that this is one of the aspects that really sets Marathon apart from other games; no other game has anything approaching the sheer depth of the Marathon Trilogy's plot. Half-Life is often considered (by the less-enlightened masses) to have the best story of any FPS, but is there any Half-Life's Story site? Marathon is one of the few games that, rather than trying to be an "interactive movie", actually uses its status as a computer game to create a compelling story that, more than simply being a sequence of events, uses a combination of gameplay and writing to establish an almost overwhelming mood and form an enthralling tapestry of characters and events, even though none of the main characters except the marine are physical entities. Perhaps the most interesting part of the story, though, is that Bungie [i]doesn't[/i] always tell everything about what's going on, leaving plenty mysteries behind for the player to dwell upon in lieu of doing English homework...
Also, I'm relatively certain that Marathon is the only video game to contain Shakespeare references and an excerpt from the Song of Roland.
