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| I'll sum up what I saw | |
| Posted By: Miguel Chavez <bs@bungie.org> | Date: 5/18/04 12:11 a.m. |
In Response To: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death (Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)) First off, I'll say that I had NO clue of this whole Enkidu thing. I saw it and was intrigued. Interesting stuff. Classic Marathon text screens. Folks were filling up the forums discussing it. I saw alot of folks debate over whether or not it was real, as in Bungie had a hand in it. My first reaction is... yah, maybe it IS Bungie. Wouldn't that be sweet? However, when it became clear that we had a long way to go, and that with E3 coming up soon answers might be forthcoming there, I did what I thought was the smart thing to do: I stopped being anxious over the whole thing. If I found out the Mona Lisa was made by an unknown, or that Plato didn't write half his dialogues, would that make those works any less potent? Couple that with the fact that we're talking about a FUCKING VIDEO GAME, you can see why I wasn't going to get my nose bent out of shape about the whole thing. But here is where I confess to my baser thoughts... As the terminals kept going and we started seeing rampancy screens and the like... I started to wonder. If Bungie had a hand in this, WHY were they doing this? Why so closely follow what had been done before? The Cortana letters, as much as they relate thematically with the Marathon terminals, are COMPLETELY different in presentation. They include cryptic radio transmissions, with religious connotations, etc.; in other words, they refused to imitate and instead evolved from what had been done before. So about mid way through I started to get annoyed with Enkidu. Seriously, beyond having a strong grasp of the literary challenges these kind of terminals involve, and the competance to weave them together in a sort of 'short story' format, what did Enkidu bring to the table that Marathon didn't do about a decade ago? Nothing new really. (IMO) So again, I was back in a state where I was trying to figure out if in fact Bungie was behind all this and if so, why were they making such a stupid error on their part? What a lame way to attract us die-hards (who would be over this like stink on shit) with a 'replica' of what once happened. That was enough to snap me back into the 'who cares who started it... just READ the story and judge it on its content.' So I did... and I was blown away. It's a very nice taut short story, that gets you hooked in enough to really want to see how it ends. If I was in Claude's shoes and saw Steve's email that I assume said 'hey, I have this Halo fan fiction that is a homage to Marathon, with tons of juicy bits for folks to chew on, in serialized format, but I can't present it the way I want to on your fan fiction section,' would I have not said 'Hmm, well do you mind if I see what you've done so far?' If I then read this story and thought I was staring at something wonderful, would I have simply said 'Sorry, no HTML allowed, put it on a free server or something, good luck' or would I have said 'Steve, this rocks, I would LOVE to help you present it in as best a possible method as possible, the fans would go crazy, they LOVE mysteries!' I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. The timing was weird, with E3 and Wideload and all that, but thems the breaks. So thanks Steve, that was some mighty fine shit you wrote there. Thanks for giving folks a taste of what we once were *floating up to our necks in!* years ago, when the wonderousness of Hamish's page and the games themselves, still so relevant back then, were fresh in our minds. I'm thrilled that folks like nof were inspired enough to load up Aleph One and try out the original game on current hardware... that is just awesome. Kudos to you Steve! - M | |
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