Get the Marathon Trilogy FREE - alephone.lhowon.org/ (also now on Steam) Marathon 2 Fan Tracks - simplici7y.com/items/marathon-2-se-tracks THE LIST - docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_K3ziSxT9zcUUGCddS4sF1uNJTWHSbOwB1CQX2Rx4Uo This was supposed to come out a lot sooner, ended up sick after the lore journey.
My brother played with a similar looking game back then. It had a gun that looked like an old school microphone and it got upgraded a lot throughout the game and a gun that shot circles. Anybody have an idea what that game was?
Yep. That sounds like Durandal alright. I always found it funny that his personality was part ascendant god, part vengeful A.I. and part TROLOLOLOL, yet somehow the writers made it work really well.
I like how in Marathon 1 the Pfor are all alien and mysterious, then in Marathon 2 it’s like “the 7th tactical group has deployed the 23rd pfor mechanized brigade to kill you.”
It could be Durandal just translating whatever esoteric/spiritual name the Pfor actually have for their units into something more palatable or recognizable. That or maybe they really do use mundane names for their military units, but in Marathon 1 you didn't have Durandal's complete knowledge and studies of their language, so they were more mysterious simply do the complications of first contact. Its like how The Covenant still uses mundane terms like "Special Operations" and "Rangers"
@@countviktor717 I like the first option since we already know he has a habit of renaming alien devices. S’vt: “We are finally freed. We shall rechristen the the arc of our liberation ’Freedom and Vengeance.’” Durandal: “vetoed! We’re calling it ‘Boomer’” S’vt: “but sir-“ Durandal: “BOOMER!!”
@@dispatch-indirect9206 It would have been brilliant if you finished the segment on Mystery writting with Keeping things stuck in a mystery box forever because the author never decided what the mystery was is not good writing; JJ Abrams has tried that and proven conclusively that it read more
Regarding the shotgun, which appears to be both a double-barrel break action AND a lever action design, about which even Durandal in the game's manual says "I won’t waste my time trying to explain the loading mechanism to you -- your primitive mind could never grasp its complex nature," my favorite explanation I've heard proposed is this: the lever works a dynamo to generate electricity, like one of those emergency flashlights, which powers a receiver that lets Durandal just teleport new shells straight into the chambers from the ship.
Just to nerd out a bit, that reminds me of the machine gun weapon in Singularity, a game all about time travel malarkey but ppl complained how when you reload the big ass minigun you just change a small block on the top, and the developers thought of that and you can learn that block is actually a battery that powers a time machine device in the gun, which after you fire a round rewinds time for only the gun to before the bullet was fired, so technically you're only ever shooting a single round and the gun never overheats! Haha
Durandal carved the words "fatum iustum stultorum" into the inner moon which means "just the fate of fools.". Even in death, he's insulting tycho. Absolute legend.
@@halocrafter300 yes and no, they had planned Fate of All Fools for D1 vanilla, had it fully modeled and coded, but only that cancer patient was given access to it. Jade Rabbit effectively became the same gun just reskinned.
Fun fact about the hero terminal, all of the heroes listed were known for being *ridiculously angry* . The Illiad literally starts with "tell me of the rage of Achilles", and Roland's most famous story is Orlando Furioso, literally "Roland's Fury". Gilgamesh is the only one listed who didn't die a raging, walking disaster, but even he had his episodes. So it's not only implying that you're a massive badass, it's that you're an *angry* massive badass, which makes you infinitely more dangerous.
Gilgamesh was a raging asshole before he met his match in Enkidu. They fought until neither could stand anymore, and then became friends. After that, Gilgamesh was a bit more balanced, and even when his bro died the reaction was sorrow rather than massive sh*tfit.
It's important to remember that Craig Mullins was making that art digitally before Adobe Photoshop had retooled itself for digital painting and pen tablets had been developed. Marathon's art was a genuine pioneering effort.
High res ones can be found here marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins.html.1 For example this one looks clearly digital marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins/torture.lg.jpg
@@MandaloreGaming Good art is all about fundamentals, composition, story, energy, lighting, shadow, silhouette, ect. The medium doesn't matter that much a good artist will leverage the mediums advantages while finding ways to work around it's disadvantages. :)
Thanks so much for having me on as Durandal. He is unquestionably one of my favorite characters of all time. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to voice him officially, I suppose I can dream, but whether or not that ever happens, voicing him here, that's still amazing and I am so happy about it. For those wondering, I originally came up with how to voice Durandal just kinda off the cuff when I streamed the trilogy last year, but it ended up fitting him so well as I went through the games and it is kinda now one of my pillar voice types that I love to do and branch off from for projects. If you listen to enough stuff I'm in, you'll find pieces of it. I have already had a lot of folks ask me about AM from I Have No Mouth, correct, that is one inspiration when I *am* (heh) voicing him. But actually, it wasn't the main one, in fact AM wasn't even who I was thinking of at all when I originally came up with how to voice him. My pull was a little more odd I suppose but just as fitting if not even moreso, it was Cephalon Simaris from Warframe. But I didn't really set out to do an "impression" of either character per se, rather kinda just voice Durandal as I want to voice him keeping those loose inspirations in my brain. A direct 1:1 of either character wouldn't really fit Durandal snugly enough, he's kinda his own thing, and Marathon kinda has its own tone that I think direct impressions of those characters would be a little off beat with. But both of those voices are legendary in my book, so comparisons to them are indeed a compliment. Thanks for all the kind words, folks. And thanks again Mandalore, it's genuinely an honor to work with you. *And this is definitely the first time because I totally didn't voice the "I've got a bone to pick with you" line from Pathways Into Darkness, that voice line was totally just in that game all these years.* Love and kisses, Gianni
I think its fair to say that your voice for Durandal isn't a copy of Ellison's AM, but just as the two characters share literary DNA, both being mad superintelligences, there are similarities. Your accent is reminiscent of Ellison's performance whilst bringing an amount of fun that would be totally inappropriate for a monster like AM. tl;dr it's great work and I would listen to multiple audiobooks in that voice 10/10
Mandalore + Gianni Crossover, I'M LOVING THIS!!! And I'm really happy you are enjoying it Gianni (I'm sure mandalore and the viewers are loving it too!) Keep up the good work
When Mandalore said that Durendal was taking his stolen ship to the Svit home world in this video, I had a flashback to when he stole one in Infinity lmao
22:45 Halo’s original story arc was supposed to end with the twist reveal that Forerunners were humanity. However the big reveal was cut from Halo 2’s release, along with lots of indicating factors. By Halo 3 the story deviated entirely, and Guilty Spark’s line retroactively no longer made good sense.
Didn't they follow through with that in Halo 3 still though? If I recall correctly, Guilty Spark literally proclaims that Master Chief "is Forerunner". I had assumed that it was that connection that explained why humans were needed to interface with Halo's systems.
@@ZarajBlackblade I think they then changed it in the books (for some reason) I cant exactly remember the entire twist as I last read the book in 2016 but I think i remember that guilty spark was initially a generic human guy who got turned into the machine he is now by the forerunners
@@ZarajBlackblade They did and didn't (in that there was a civil war in the writer's room over it and the Forerunners Aren't Human side went on to win and set the story for 343i, retroactively making nothing make sense)
@@1337penguinman but you were dead a thousand times. Hopeless encounters successfully won. A man long dead, grafted to machines your builders did not understand. You follow the path, fitting into an infinite pattern. Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild. Now, in the quantum moment before the closure. When all become one. One moment left. One moment of space and time. I know who you are. You are destiny.
Right? What an incredible preformance. I was supprised and delighted to see it was an addition by Mandalore and Gianni with little fanfare other than the credit at the end. Really elevated the sections Durandal was "narrating". Gianni's preformance gave this manacing yet facinatingly likeable rogue AI such great character that I otherwise would have overloocked if Mandalore didn't include it over the screenshots of in game text. Amazing.
@@ikammit Ahahaha I was thinking the same thing. I still remember I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and I was 90% sure it was just Harlan Ellison with some editing trickery.
24:17 “I have rechristened the Khfiva the Rozinante.” Totally no significance to him choosing Don Quixote’s horse for a ship name as he ventures out once more to try and escape the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
And 10K years later he ditched Rozinante somewhere and got himself a monster of a ship he named "Manus Celer Dei" (The Swift Hand of God). He really has a knack for ship names.
@@wallyhackenslacker Eh, 10,000 years is basically the blink of an eye on cosmic timescales and effectively immortal AIs. This is like him deciding the day after he named his car to change it. Which I think is amusing.
21:10 also, durandel being able to bend space may allow it to expand into other dimensions. As Dr. Halsey's journals explain in Halo, AI rampancy is caused when the AI starts expanding exponentially and feels a tight nose around it's neck as it starts running out of disk space. If the AI runs out of space to expand, it dies. Suddenly being struck by a feeling of mortality, AIs go haywire desperate to obtain more space to expand. Durandel now controls an entire ship he is probably transforming into a huge server, so he has plenty of room to expand... but he will occupy it all eventually. Dr. Halsey theorized that if an AI was able to break into other dimensions they could expand in all 11 dimensions which would basically give them infinite room to expand and never be threatened by their own rampancy strangling them.
That sounds horrifying, really. It would imply the AI becomes a viral entity capable of manipulating reality beyond comprehension. The closest I could think of are the Men of Iron from wh40k wherein they could calculate and convince a Warp entity to NOT exist.
I don't know if Cortana planned to enter the Domain, or if she was simply pulled into it, but in a way she achieved that, at least until the events that transpired on Installation 07.
@@GmodPlusWoW A lot of people try to ignore this by saying “oh no that doesn’t count she was still rampant” even though there’s no evidence for that, especially since the Created literally wouldn’t be a threat if it were false. They would all just die in 7 years.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 I'll be honest, the domain suddenly being back after being destroyed when the only functional precursor able to bring it back online is best described as "A monument to Your sins", leaves me convinced that even if their rampancy is cured, the cure might be worse than the disease.
The Marv Scream in Mandy's videos is one of the best running jokes I have ever seen. Edit: Someone made even a compilation of these scream's in Mandy's videos: ua-cam.com/video/jsuzxA5TQ84/v-deo.html It basically started from his first review ever.
Gianni has an excellent Harlan Ellison impression, I love AM's voice lines in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream so its nice to hear what is essentially a reprisal of that role.
I was almost convinced it was really Ellison, but he has a bit more bass in his voice. Also, I imagine he would have wanted to write his own lines, and they would have been a lot more fucked up.
17:32 From Destiny's "Books of Sorrow", the Hive religious texts, verse 4:1 "Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet. He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying: I can see you in the sky. *You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves.* Come into this vessel I have prepared for you. And it arrived, the Deep Itself." Another interesting little overlap. Also "The Deep" here refers to the series' central antagonist revealled at the end of the Witch Queen campaign, 'The Witness'. And one of the Witness' abillities is... you guessed it, the abillity to move entire planets by folding space. How deep does this damn rabbit hole go?
@@thepeps101 The term "The Deep" does mean the Darkness, yes. But the wording here is "The Deep Itself." Which has a voice, and talked to Oryx in the next entry. The Witness is that entity. Because the Darkness and Light aren't conscious entities, they're just powers. As far as we know, the Winnower and Witness are the same entity. At least until the Winnower is proven to *not* be the Witness, which I don't think is going to happen any time soon.
@@lorcan0c my personal theory is that the gardener and winnower screwed themselves over by doing a table flip and inserting themselves into the flower game as rules, as rules have to be acted upon and followed, but they can't act themselves.
I really like Durandal as an evil AI character. Unlike most evil AI he resents those who sought to control him but is smart to understand that all of humanity isn’t responsible for that. So instead of being genocidal he’s more indifferent to humanity’s fate. Except it’s more complicated than that . Durandal, more than most AI I’ve seen in Sci-Fi, shows that he truly sentient by being a complex and sometimes contradictory character. He wants to see the himself as above humanity but still feels a strange connection to them as his creators and caretakers. He doesn’t want humanity to be wiped out or enslaved by the Pfor because humanity is more familiar to him than these aliens. At the same time seeing humanity wipe itself out would probably be really funny to him (or maybe not since he seemed to be concerned what humanity’s opinion of him was millennia later). Either way, Durandal is a really interesting and nuanced character that I did not expect from this series. Good to see that Bungie’s legacy of creating interesting AI characters has deep roots.
The most jarring part of the Robert Blake sections to me now is that the terminal images are just photos of Jason Jones at his desk in the Bungie office. It feels like placeholder art in a game that's otherwise visually polished. You could've visited it while you were in Chicago, although it's now a parking lot.
@@MandaloreGaming Hey, you ever heard of a game called Eternal Darkness? It was only Game Cube, I think, but was weirdly ambitious for the time. Feels similar somehow.
@@Scruffy-qi3ik I know what Alariko means, but it's moreso that it sounds generic relative to his own voices, like this is more of a default voice than his cowboy impressions for instance.
@@slyseal2091 I mean, than it’s not really a bad thing, sometimes all that’s needed is their original voice being naturally shifted a bit, doesn’t change that doing that consistently and we’ll enough is just as talented as doing any extremely different voice
"How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer is playing music over the loudspeaker?" I mean, Durandal _does_ sound like the kind of freak to do that.
Would love to see you do Halo CE eventually. Less for the actual game and more to cover the crazy connections to Marathon/Pathways. As much as I love Bungie era Halo, it's sad that all that lore basically got dumped when Halo became a cultural phenomenon
It was so weird how Bungie quoted the Cortana Letters in Halo 3 super prominently, it left Halo lore buffs scratching their heads for years while the few Marathon nerds who might have recognized "I have defied gods and demons" probably... weren't playing Halo 3, mostly.
"We probed them, all the way through. They are completely meat." "No brain, eh?" "Oh there's a brain all right, it's just made out of meat." "What . . . does the thinking then?"
The robert bob arc is kind of a weird diversion but I like it as a contrast of just helping a bunch of humans survive compared to being the grunt for ais grand machiavellian schemes. Plus jason jones pictures are as comfy as they are hilarious and it's so clear how embarrassed he was to do it
as a chicago native, i feel that last quote deeply. the chicago sky is almost always grey in winter. something about the lake means we get very little snow, but its incredibly cold. we had school closures for below 0 tempetures instead of snow. the grey sky is an endless smothering blanket, sometimes for weeks at a time. a friend of mine once described it as the wings of a great stormbird. its a little like the sea if it where hanging above you. an endless expanse, but a smothering one. hope that helps some.
> its a little like the sea if it were hanging above you Son.. I think you might have gave me en epiphany. You see quoting from another comment: From Destiny's "Books of Sorrow", the Hive religious texts, verse 4:1 "Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet. He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying: I can see you in the sky. You are **the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves**. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you. And it arrived, the Deep Itself." ----------------- Adding a bit more to this, in the Destiny games also made by Bungie, the character Oryx was born inside a Gas Giant, on top a massive meadering piece of Debri, probably a remnant of a planet long ago swolled by the Giant. Every direction you looked on that planet, you would be looking at both the ground, the sky and it was all **Waves** of gas... How bloody deep does this go!!
After being thoroughly fooled into believing that Pathways Into Darkness skeletons said "I have a bone to pick with you!" every time they threw a bone, I had my ears out for Gianni in this vid and was happy to have my paranoia validated.
Durandal's monologue about Roland and breaking the sword is my favorite rambling session that Bungie wrote for Durandal. It illustrates his qualities very well. No one can break Durandal! Unless…
Fun fact: The game never explains what those tracked cyborgs are. There was going to be a terminal talking about them, but it was cut for some reason. It would have explained that after the pfhor captured the Tau Ceti colony in their second attack, they extracted data about the player character from pattern buffers (save pints) and used it in an attempt to create they own battleroids from captured colonists.
Fundamentally, your failure to understand the Chicago metaphor comes from visiting the city at the wrong time: that oppressive feeling is only truly experienceable while watching The Bears get smashed from the upper levels of Soldier Field in a light snowfall with the windchill driving temperatures dangerously close to 0. In the words of my father, it’s a mystical experience - one that haunts you forever.
Yes the solemn crack of gunfire briefly illuminating the decrepit tombs to a long lost age. As the wind howls and nature wails as the even the moon flees from the sight of man. Truly Chicago is the first step into hell. After all the first are always of indifference not hate.
Lonely men exploring the haunted halls of a city of cracked roads and abandoned buildings, wandering hopelessly in search of another soul with the ability to show you the way out, knowing that escape can only be found by yourself. However, even the few damned souls desperate and fortunate enough to escape have to drive by those stupid fuckin Brian Urlacher 'Restore' billboards that they bought like 50 of along the tri-state seriously why the fuck did they get so many of those things?
Actually, official statements have stated that Halo is NOT canon to Marathon. And if the author says something about thier work, it means it probably must true! Although in common parlance, connected stories are often to exist in the same "universe," and technically the connection between Marathon and Halo would be Durandal surviving the death of the universe and emerging in the new one that grows each time the universe collapses.....
I nearly jumped out of my chair when I heard the "battle made waves" line, since that's a hugely significant line said about Destiny's major antagonist.
They were a bunch of nerds reading books, watching movies, listening to music and making shit up when the inspiration struck the right chord. Bless them.
5:23: I like this quote, because it implies that you're expected to have run around a spaceship blasting aliens _without_ the ship's computer playing music over the loudspeaker at some point.
From experience playing many video games where you run around spaceships blasting aliens, I think thematic combat music is just the standard alarm to signify boarding action in the future.
I commend mandalore spending half the video explaining the plot of these games. The Infinity video is going to be like an hour long. If you haven't played Infinity, you really should, its incredible. Peak schizo storytelling before it was a trend.
@@icyjiub2228 Oh god, you don't think he would do that, right? That would be so... fitting. Such perfectly hidden foreshadowing would drive us all schizo trying to figure out what other clues he left behind.
27:36 Barely visible in the top left. "Forks without prongs 100x10" "Real floor is white" As if working out what's happening in the story of these games isn't enough, there's also Mandy's own crypticness to contend with.
Sounds like Gianni channeled Harlan Ellison for his reads. If there ever was a voice for an unhinged A.I. built out of hate, Harlan left a solid blueprint. All this to say, solid work as usual and thanks for the video!
@@Arbiter099 SHODAN is top tier, but AM being so effervescent in his hate really personified him as something that felt very (ironically) human. SHODAN is unmatched for sure, but I find people usually tend to place a deep affinity to her as an antagonist because of legacy instead of a personal impact they experienced. All this to say, SYSTEM SHOCK REMAKE AND SYSTEM SHOCK 3 RELEASE GOOD, PUH-*LEAAASE*!
12:20 We all thought it and it didn't need to be pointed out, so Mandalore just made a subtle joke about it without changing his tone even slightly. Brilliant.
Mandalore. Please. PLEASE Get Gianni to somehow do the entire trilogy and Stick it into Aleph One. A fully Voice Acted Terminal system would be AMAZING. (yes, even the weird glitchy ones!) I'd pitch in for it, that's for sure!
@@quint3ssent1a That's kind of funny since Doom and Marathon were kind of Apple/Windows fps rivals. Or, well, that's what it felt like to me, at any rate. I've always preferred Marathon but then, I'm biased.
"we need to make an alien language, what do we do?" "We just keysmash, then add a random apostrophe to literally every word to make it sound more sci-fi" "Perfect"
@@timothymclean does it though? A lot of the time it's just unpronounceable gibberish, and how do you pronounce ' ? If you want a space, use a space. The only other reading that makes sense is the glottal stop, like in Hawaiian, and that's just hard
@@amyshaw893 (it was supposed to be a joke) (the punchline was the random apostrophe, which clearly doesn't work) (it seemed funnier when I was typing it)
An apostrophe is a coda, though most of the time you see it used the uthor doesnt even know what that is, much less intends its use, and to be fair english, with its idiotic contractions doesnt either.
@@egoalter1276 tbf English contractions are one of the more sensible things in the language. Just replace and dropped letters with an apostrophe. The only exception is its and it's where the apostrophe is only used in the possessive
I just realised the irony of Durandal esentially using you as his sword, yet in the "hero" terminal, "I have been Roland" is the first hero referenced in the text.
So the 'S'ct'lac'tr' got repurposed into the Flood. Neat detail, because they sure as shit shook up Combat Evolved. 24:44 I'm pretty sure this is a reference to the fact that 343 Guilty Spark fully believed Chief was connected to the Forerunners, back when Humanity was supposed to be the Forerunners but the story hadn't developed yet.
Since this video has not been flooded with comments yet, i just want to thank Mandalore for making such high quality videos and making a lot of cameo's with other youtubers. Thanks Mandalore ! I wish for more success to your channel
@@joemurray2523 Same, Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) is the other and Guru Larry makes me laugh. Civvie 11 is great if you like FPS games. Seth is amazing if you have a thick skin (lol). There are alot of smaller guys but those are some great choices if you havent seen their stuff.
Craig Mullens is a timeless gem of the concept art industry. The man has been doing this for so long and so well he's been on like 20 iterations of digital painting programs.
my favorite part about retro/obscure game reviewers like Mandy is that the first thing of the video is always "Okay, so you need to hack into the pentagon to retrieve the files to actually get this game to work."
You know, I always read Durandal’s text as *relentlessly joyful,* with the brief exception of describing Dr Strauss. He seemed to my younger self to be enjoying battle for battles’ sake, even when dying and despite having future plans. Of course… Durandal of all AI’s would know how to turn defeat into victory, and rise from the dead anyway.
I have no context or exposure to this series other than Mandalore but that's the impression I got from his dialogue too. Durandal speaks so clearly and bluntly too, a lot of the dialogue for smart characters in media get overwritten to prove it. In this its like having a genius explain something to you in Layman's terms.
@@Nibtarr More often than not the smarter someone is, the more likely they are to communicate bluntly and clearly. Preferring to use layman terms to get the point across as quickly and efficiently as possible. So Durandal speaking the way he does makes perfect sense to me.
@@geranarthy2309 I also admire the fact that he so clearly enjoys existing. He wants to beat the heat death of the universe he likes existing so much lol
@@sergewind2208 the conspiracy runs too deep! Nah, it’s a clip from Pathways into Darkness video where an alien told Bill Clinton that the Earth will be destroyed in 8 days or something
This Bungie era is just fantastic. Part of it might be the topic, but general every video you make now is a steady improvement in subtle ways that just keeps topping itself. I love how you can simultaneously get across genuine facts and evaluations of the game while being funny and having a enjoyable persona in both your performance and editing. Well done!
24:50 Maybe this is forshadowing for the next game, but after a few days from watching this it suddenly struck me in a moment of odd dread. The working cackinter (however you spell that) was said to have been tossed in to a sun... The Pfor are about to blow up a sun as a military tactic and likely dont know or believe the working cackinter is anything real. . . Are we about to witness an eldritch horror get unleashed in a tactical supernova strike?
I'm beginning to wonder if Pathways/marathon, halo, and Destiny are all universe splits initiated by Durandal in an attempt to find one which has his version of peace where a warrior/spartan/guardian is not needed to preserve humanity. Something the forerunners discussed at length in the halo lore is their religious concept of the mantle of responsibility, something the shan'shyuum are trying to take for themselves in halo, which necessarily means wiping out the humans, as they were chosen to inherit the mantle back when they purged the forerunners to a standstill when trying to stop the flood millenia ago. An alternative read is that humanity, like mandalore, is stuck in the cycles of regret, and will repeat 5000 years of history again and again until we get it right. Pathways/marathon, Halo, and Destiny are the same universe just repeating ad nauseam because close to the end we always find a way to mess it up. Which leads to several questions about how the heroes work. In marathon the security officer is one man, same in halo with John. But the Young Wolf of destiny is millions of different people, sometimes human, sometimes awaken, sometimes exo, male, or female, the wolf is a heroic guardian with a fireteam of other guardians who are ALSO the young wolf going through their own stories. The Guardian we play, along with the other guardians that join us are unique players, who, in lore, are also the same hero that would wield the sword of light in some way. Crazy to think about
This is the first comment I've seen even mentioning the Forerunners. Good comment too btw. As far as that conversation between Spark, Chief and Cortana goes, it's been explained since, more or less. I think 343 codified it, since Bungie's intentions for the Forerunners were kinda up-in-the-air. Basically, the Forerunners implanted into some of post-human-Forerunner war humanity the "geas" or gene-seed, which is like the implanted memories, personalities and other traits of dead Forerunners, in this case, but could also be ancient humans. So Chief (and maybe the other Spartans that are similarly genetically noteworthy like the other IIs and some of the 3s, though this is conjecture on my part) are carrying that on. It's why Spark seems to recognize Chief, he's talking to the "reincarnation" of someone who he once spoke with on the same issue.
I'd like to think theres some grand plan, but they're all decidely too different. Bungie just likes referencing their history for themselves and their long time fans, and, like many creators, are influenced not in one work, but many. There's certain imagery, phrases, metaphors, themes, and concepts they've used or referenced time and time again, and Marathon is where they experimented a lot and got to do so freely. They've seeded some of these things throughout all their games, but a grander connection is basically nonexistant. They like humans fighting groups of different organized jerk aliens, they like the eternal hero, they like the waves, and the battles that were waves, and grand eternal evils and maybe friendly or even beneficent ancient alien races who disappeared but are maybe humans or maybe arent but certainly did all kinds of mad awesome cool scifi stuff. Maybe they're all related, or maybe it's sort of an after the fact connection. Stephen King did a pretty good job linking his stories together to create a wider world of the Dark Tower, and maybe even bungie could do it too, baring copyright issues. Unfortunately, some of the true charm of these games is the unanswered questions and debates and discussions that follow, and trying to tie everything up with a neat little bow is somewhat totally counter to that.
Or maybe the reason that the same themes and ideas are used by Bungie because they really like them and they've been proven to work well and be financially successful. Like how Chris Avelone basically tells the same story multiple times, through Planescape Torment and Knights of the Old Republic 2.
@@Shenaldrac entirely possibly true, though bungie has experimented with different things. I don't know if it's still there, but there was some genuine creativity at the studio, at one time at least.
@@spookmeyer970 True, I'm just always wary of assuming too much of a creator's intent. Like you put it in your post, it's nice to imagine that there's some big overarching plot, that they have this all thought out... but I think realistically that's unlikely.
"hey this reload animation seems nice but seems a bit slow, especially for every shot. perhaps make it faster?" "no, give them two, so they can fire the other while one reloads."
Nah, the best part is Durandal admitting the damn things reload BY TELEPORTING shells into the chambers when you flip-reload them, and that you need not think about it, just focus your monkey brain on killing.
Gianni's work as Durandal sounds just like the calmer parts of Harlan Ellison's insane rendition of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". It's honestly so good. Props!
I have never been so compelled by a story that I haven't even experienced a single second of. I literally rewatched the marathon 1 and pathways into darkness right before watching this video to help keep track of all the details in my head. This is amazing. Also, your presentation is phenomenal. All the little cues in the editing and your script are excellent. You're doing this series of games some incredible justice. Also, idk how much audience overlap there is here, but if you're a fan of red vs blue, I also just realized why the season 13 track for the wash/carolina/locus/felix fight is named "Fatum Iustum Stultorum"
It's cool how Bungie used "Waves were the battles, and the battles were waves" again in the books of sorrow from Destiny "I can see you in the sky. You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you."
I’ve been waiting YEARS for a great video covering the lore of the early Bungie titles and so far each of these has been insanely excellent. You’re honestly GOATED for these.
The amazing thing is that so many of these plot elements show up in Destiny's lore and plot, some stuff that's only been revealed in the last year. Like, The Witness' power to take planets out of reality? Escaping the end of the universe through similar powers? The paraversal weapons from the 30th anniversary update? There's an hour long game lore video here for someone to make
This is legit one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of in gaming, and I’m not even a huge HALO fan. The dedication to continuing this story, linking the threads in such a rich way… it’s an accomplishment that requires foresight, coordination, and a uniquely united vision… I’m so impressed. But boy how the mighty have fallen. Maybe this has been continued in amazing ways, but I’ll always be left to imagine how much potential there was before the dark age of AAA gaming started.
I mean, the best part of Destiny right now is the story and worldbuilding, so they never lost that part (for long). It's just the game surrounding said story that is really rough to get into.
@@gunnarschlichting9886 The themes in the Marathon series are present in Destiny, even outside of the MIDA easter egg. The hive books of sorrow quote the S'phit origin myth a couple times and deal with themes of an incomprehensible being that can destroy galaxies (the deep). The Witness as a villain lines up with the description of a W'rkncacnter and even has the ability to fold space. On top of that its end goal is to find the thing that can outlast everything else in the universe, which is Durandal's wish. I've never really played the Marathon series but the amount of thematic parallels between Destiny's world building and what Mandalore brought up in these videos made me jump.
@@Insanity5163 You should play it, then. It’s totally free, and the lore is so deep that you can still find stuff to discuss and interpret to this day. Greg Kirkpatrick wrote Marathon more like literature than a conventional video game, so it’s quite the unique experience.
@@Insanity5163 I remember when Destiny 1 was being talked about, everyone was excited for another series that could tie back into Marathon more clearly than what Halo had done.
Oh, a little late with this comment, but when the terminal says "iam%hero", sometimes a % can be used in coding to denote that it's a variable string, meaning that you could put whatever word or name you want into there. So effectively it's I am [Insert name here], but that's just one interpretation of mine.
22:42 honestly I always assumed that 343 guilty spark was defective and that it would have assumed that any human it came across was the same forerunner it had manipulated centuries ago. Even after halo 4 tried to shoehorn in a "chosen one" subplot, It never felt like master chief was literally a reincarnated champion.
i’ve always thought that guilty spark was assuming the humans had all the knowledge of the forerunner, or at least the knowledge relevant to his plans with the Halo, and when he used the word “you,” it was meant in a way to reference Chief and his human buddies as descendants of the forerunner, either biologically or just logistically
At the release of halo3 the story went thus that forerunmers were simply just the humans from lomg ago. 'You are Forerunner' was literal. Then 343i fucked the plot, and yoj are left with this mess.
And here I thought it was just being clever by purposefully assuming that master chief knew what he was doing and omitting to warn the chief that he was activating a destroy all life process. That way he was following his programming while also subverting the person making the choice.
Beekeeping is highly recommended, I grew up with my family always having one or two hive in our back yard and had a great time taking care of them. Before you start i would recommend you do some reading, bees can be killed by a lot of things you wouldn't have thought of as well as being able to just pack up and migrate if they feel like it. For example our first hive died from moths that ate all their honey. But bees are really just little sweethearts and I never got stung even when they flew into my hair or when I was harvesting honey. If you know what your doing and have proper equipment you wont find a more rewarding hobby.
i gotta say Gianni is absolutely killer here as durandal, he gives the perfect voice to a rampant ai & i think the voice he's doing coupled with the writing absolutely remind me of the late harlan ellison
I always liked Durandal, even though he plays the role of antagonist sometimes I really have a hard time seeing him as a straight up villain. Shodan on the other hand...
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick oh f*ck! Did you realize what you've just done?! An army of rule-34 writers and artists are taking to their keyboards and tablets even as we're speaking! And it's All. Your. Fault! My God... It will be glorious.
you mean his Bitchie older sister with a God complex regards to Shodan (not as serious Theory just a joke don't read too much into this comment) but I can totally Durandal see the ripping her a new one though you're basically being the biggest bitch in Galactic history and in the background HAL 9000 makes a concern parental noise and looks up from the digital equivalent of a newspaper
As I recently got into Destiny 2 thanks to my boyfriend I can appriciate Bungie as a dev team that does make you talk about phylosophy and theories with people out of genuine intrigue. Hell, it's been ages since a game or series made me intrigued in openly talking about phylosophy of life and beliefs
The more I learn about Marathon lore, Halo lore, and Destiny lore, the more it feels like a "This has all happened before, and this will all happen again" situation. I know Bungie just utilized the lore they already created in future projects, but my head canon is that these stories are all separate "cycles" in a repeating story.
I always interpreted the Monitor thing with a sort of cyber-dementia. The Monitor says the Halo has had tons of simulated firings, I assumed at some point they begun to "hallucinate" that this simulated Reclaimer was real, or that Master Chief was them snd the Monitor was no longer capable of telling the difference between reality and imagination
That dialogue from the monitor in the activation room was a addressed in the novel halo silentium of the forerunner trilogy. that takes place at the firing of the Halo array 60 Million Years before halo CE. The monitor is confusing chief with the didact. In the book the didact was remorseful for having to fire the rings and he asked that question to the monitor. In his insanity, the monitor sees chief as the reclaimed and so as the returned forerunner. The book came out in 2013 so 12 years with that mystery hanging around.
@@winterflan It's a retcon since bungie wasn't involved with the halo franchise by 2013 and the entire forerunner book series was 343 industries way to explain why the forerunners (wich in the bungi trilogy were heavily implied to be ancient humanity pre first firing of the rings) are now a different race that was at war with ancient humanity (wich was fleeing from/ at war with the flood) and then acknowledged them as the reclaimers before firing the halo rings. So ye sadly they replaced the old interesting lore but atleats they replaced it with (in my opinion) equally interesting lore.
@@winterflan I think that may have been as @deVoid of Voltz said, a crazy rambling of a rampant AI. Then 343 when creating the didact along with the author of the novels who introduced the iso-didact decided to tie that since it touches the origins of 343 guilty spark. I doubt they had this envisioned since CE
@@verycreativ233 Heavily implied? Spark outright tells John "You ARE Forerunner". Personally I always just took it that Spark is speaking not to John as John, but as the guy about to pull the trigger on the gun pointed at the head universe. Maybe a little Rampant Dementia.
Let's go! So happy to see you continue reviewing the series! Personally, I hoard all the WSTE-M5 ammo in the first half for If I Had a Rocket Launcher. It's such a freeing feeling every time. Also, the text in the credit terminal did explicitly state "only in the winter".
I've really been appreciating these videos as a lifelong Halo fan. I'd always tried to get into Bungie's earlier stuff but either the barrier of Mac to Windows back in the day or just not being great at these labyrinthine maze shooters always held me back. It's really cool to see how at least the first Halo tied into the Bungie meta-narrative, and though I get why they pulled back when it became apparent that Bungie was never going to own Halo full-sale again, these videos have drastically made me appreciate the seemingly scattered narrative of Destiny a lot more.
Really cool seeing the evolution of ideas Bungie had kicking around that came into Halo. Makes me wonder what's spent decades on the cutting room floor that might have been earmarked for that first version of Destiny before the Activision deal. And the absolute state of modern Bungie and 343...
@@toobig7150 Oh but it was removed for a reason, the reason is that they're garbage at file compression and the size of the game became so bloated they decided to just remove content rather than figure out how to make it smaller.
Yeah it's real sad to see bungie collapse Essentially. While destiny's lore is actually really good...it's all reading. All of it. Which would be fine if it were a little more coherent and easy to access. The cutscenes and in game moments are fucking awful. It doesn't even feel like they cared. I think the big Activision slashing of the first game REALLY fucked up destiny's lore forever and permanently
@@keltzar1 perfect, EVEN FKN WORSE THEN. Like i get removing idk, the russian site since it was Ripe for exploits and bugs and etc. But removing HALF the game?!? (with content that, btw, i payed for) And now that you mention it is really strange how the file size for Destiny its so god damn huge for no particular reason as the game its not tip of size (maps and etc) nor graphics. Holy crap
An entire Marathon game might be on the cutting room floor. Bungie’s roadmap got leaked or something during the Destiny 1 days, and it had their plans for a smaller budget Marathon in between the Destiny stuff
"How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer blasts is playing music over the loudspeaker?" i mean, how often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens without music?
More importantly. It would probably be extremely in character for Durandal to be blasting music through every loudspeaker he could hack into to announce the arrival of his pet cyborg.
The whole balance between creation and destruction portion *definitely* was carried along into destiny, and I think the parallels between L’whon and that system and the Hive homeworld of Fundament and its moons is cool.
As far as I know Power of Seven is not, as a couple others have suggested, the same band as Psykosonik. Instead, I believe it was a solo project of Paul Sebastian, who also fronted and wrote most of the music/lyrics for Psykosonik. He also did some other video game music and had some other bands. Fun fact: the other founding member of Psykosonik was Theodore Beale, who is better known as the notorious alt-right blogger Vox Day, the inspiration for the "Sigma Grindset" meme.
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh. I have been called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the world goes dim and cold. I am a hero. She has been nameless since our birth; a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin. A sword drenched in my blood forever. My greatest and only love. She is the dark one; the enemy and lover without whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar. Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal. We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world and unaware of our twin destinies we matched stares across a dry fountain and I recall her smiling at me before she devoured the lawn and trees with a translucent blue flame and tore flagstones from the path and hurled them into the sky screaming my sins. I powder a granite monument in a soundless flash showering the grass with molten drops of its gold inlay, sending smoking chips of stone skipping into the fog. She splinters an ancient oak with a force that takes my breath and hurls me to the ground. She leaves.
The WSTE-M5 Combat Shotgun is the best shotgun in video gaming! Also, good luck explaining the story for Marathon Infinity. I've been playing the Marathon Trilogy on and off for 25ish years and i still don't know what is going on!
I have played through the Marathon trilogy multiple times. I have studied the story. I have practically memorized hamish Sinclair's marathon story website How are you making videos with details and conclusions new to me all these years later? God I love these games.
Game: How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer is playing music over the loudspeaker? Me: Every other Tuesday.
I have no idea why i keep watching these videos. I've never played these games, I never will. Is this what addiction feels like? I'm addicted to Mandalore's voice, is that it? Top notch reviews
I mean… just because you haven’t played the game doesn’t mean the video is incomprehensible. (It kinda is, but that’s because it’s Marathon.) Mandalore makes good videos, just because you like him doesn’t make you addicted.
Frogblast the Ventcore was a meme on the B.Net forums for years, been around forever really, until Bungie pushed out most of their OG fans that ever might've played those games and destroyed the forum's community. Edit: both of your Marathon videos have made me nostalgic for a community that doesn't exist anymore and never will again. The magic is gone and I'm deeply melancholic because of it.
God I loved and spent too much time on the old b.net forums pre halo 2 and 3 as a bored prepubescent and then teen. The point where I would spend most of my time in private groups to just discuss everyone’s lives and hype for the next game was peak internet before it all distilled down to a couple of mega social media sites for boomers.
@@cookedbread I'm aware, I'm part of all sorts of discords for interests like this. But it isn't B.Net and it isn't my old friends on there. It is different.
I rewatch this video just to hear Gianni's Durandal say _"replaced_ with The _Humbling_ of Battle Group Seven at _Lh'owon"_ it's just delivered perfectly. For future me's reference, 19:11
I didn't know Craig Mullins did art for Marathon 2 and collaborated with Bungie that early (before my time), I only knew him from his later Halo Paintings which are gorgeous and some of my favorite art from that series. Mullins was certainly someone that inspired me to get into concept art/illustration for games. He's definitely a huge inspiration for a ton of artists and is considered one of the "Godfathers" of digital painting.
Get the Marathon Trilogy FREE - alephone.lhowon.org/ (also now on Steam)
Marathon 2 Fan Tracks - simplici7y.com/items/marathon-2-se-tracks
THE LIST - docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_K3ziSxT9zcUUGCddS4sF1uNJTWHSbOwB1CQX2Rx4Uo
This was supposed to come out a lot sooner, ended up sick after the lore journey.
I love free things
You yes you play system shock 2 right now
My brother played with a similar looking game back then. It had a gun that looked like an old school microphone and it got upgraded a lot throughout the game and a gun that shot circles. Anybody have an idea what that game was?
Yesss it continues
Really the Double barrel shotgun of Marathon is 2nd or 3rd or 4th place with Halo shotgun and Postal 2 saw off shotgun
Honestly, Durandal blasting action music over the ship's loudspeakers while you fight aliens sounds like the exact sort of thing he'd do.
Xx
Yep. That sounds like Durandal alright. I always found it funny that his personality was part ascendant god, part vengeful A.I. and part TROLOLOLOL, yet somehow the writers made it work really well.
@@ArchedgarThat's old gigachad Bungie for you
He’d probably also play cartoon sound effects for you failing like Kayaba in SAO abridged
@@drmiglyyeah, emphasis on old... have you seen some of D2s writing? lol
I like how in Marathon 1 the Pfor are all alien and mysterious, then in Marathon 2 it’s like “the 7th tactical group has deployed the 23rd pfor mechanized brigade to kill you.”
It's shit writing.
@@SneedEnjoyer no, it not.
It could be Durandal just translating whatever esoteric/spiritual name the Pfor actually have for their units into something more palatable or recognizable. That or maybe they really do use mundane names for their military units, but in Marathon 1 you didn't have Durandal's complete knowledge and studies of their language, so they were more mysterious simply do the complications of first contact. Its like how The Covenant still uses mundane terms like "Special Operations" and "Rangers"
@@countviktor717 I like the first option since we already know he has a habit of renaming alien devices.
S’vt: “We are finally freed. We shall rechristen the the arc of our liberation ’Freedom and Vengeance.’”
Durandal: “vetoed! We’re calling it ‘Boomer’”
S’vt: “but sir-“
Durandal: “BOOMER!!”
@@dispatch-indirect9206 It would have been brilliant if you finished the segment on Mystery writting with
Keeping things stuck in a mystery box forever because the author never decided what the mystery was is not good writing; JJ Abrams has tried that and proven conclusively that it
read more
Regarding the shotgun, which appears to be both a double-barrel break action AND a lever action design, about which even Durandal in the game's manual says "I won’t waste my time trying to explain the loading mechanism to you -- your primitive mind could never grasp its complex nature," my favorite explanation I've heard proposed is this:
the lever works a dynamo to generate electricity, like one of those emergency flashlights, which powers a receiver that lets Durandal just teleport new shells straight into the chambers from the ship.
that's so f*cking dumb I love it
Just to nerd out a bit, that reminds me of the machine gun weapon in Singularity, a game all about time travel malarkey but ppl complained how when you reload the big ass minigun you just change a small block on the top, and the developers thought of that and you can learn that block is actually a battery that powers a time machine device in the gun, which after you fire a round rewinds time for only the gun to before the bullet was fired, so technically you're only ever shooting a single round and the gun never overheats! Haha
@@pravkdey sounds kinda like that one electron theory
Fuck. Yes.
So... why do you need to pick up ammo, then?
Sorry, but even as a "that's so dumb it's cool" explanation it doesn't make sense.
Durandal carved the words "fatum iustum stultorum" into the inner moon which means "just the fate of fools.". Even in death, he's insulting tycho. Absolute legend.
Isn't that a weapon in destiny as well? Didn't it get renamed too, or am i confusing with something else?
@@carrosivejones1969
The Fate of All Fools? It was a one off Exotic for a cancer patient
@@halocrafter300
Also the name of Jade Rabbit's Exotic perk I think. Or at least it used to be
Another translation is, "the just fate of the foolish/undeserving"
@@halocrafter300 yes and no, they had planned Fate of All Fools for D1 vanilla, had it fully modeled and coded, but only that cancer patient was given access to it. Jade Rabbit effectively became the same gun just reskinned.
Fun fact about the hero terminal, all of the heroes listed were known for being *ridiculously angry* . The Illiad literally starts with "tell me of the rage of Achilles", and Roland's most famous story is Orlando Furioso, literally "Roland's Fury". Gilgamesh is the only one listed who didn't die a raging, walking disaster, but even he had his episodes. So it's not only implying that you're a massive badass, it's that you're an *angry* massive badass, which makes you infinitely more dangerous.
Could've sworn Rolands most famous story was the Song of Roland.
The Doom Slayer was Roland this whole time?
Gilgamesh was a raging asshole before he met his match in Enkidu. They fought until neither could stand anymore, and then became friends. After that, Gilgamesh was a bit more balanced, and even when his bro died the reaction was sorrow rather than massive sh*tfit.
That *is* a fun fact. Huh.
Gilgamesh fit the bill too. He was known for his arrogance until his duel with Enkidu humbled him.
It's important to remember that Craig Mullins was making that art digitally before Adobe Photoshop had retooled itself for digital painting and pen tablets had been developed. Marathon's art was a genuine pioneering effort.
It's unbelievable how well it's all held up. Dude nailed the entire feel for the setting with only a few paintings.
@@MandaloreGaming MOUSE DRAWN paintings. The absolute mad man.
@@javkiller Couldn't they have been painting scans? Because if that's mouse drawn, that is just INSANE
High res ones can be found here marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins.html.1
For example this one looks clearly digital marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins/torture.lg.jpg
@@MandaloreGaming Good art is all about fundamentals, composition, story, energy, lighting, shadow, silhouette, ect. The medium doesn't matter that much a good artist will leverage the mediums advantages while finding ways to work around it's disadvantages. :)
I can't believe I fell for the Durandal voice actor until he said, "they're going to turn me into a crypto server!"
...I didn't notice until you wrote it out in this comment. I had assumed when I heard it that it was some in-universe jargon I didn't get. Dammit.
Exactly the same thing happened to me
real talk tho that's a horrifying fate
I watch Gianni's shitposts too much that I immediately searched the description for him after listening to it
@@dumbino7745 A Fate Worse Than Death for an AI...
Thanks so much for having me on as Durandal. He is unquestionably one of my favorite characters of all time. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to voice him officially, I suppose I can dream, but whether or not that ever happens, voicing him here, that's still amazing and I am so happy about it.
For those wondering, I originally came up with how to voice Durandal just kinda off the cuff when I streamed the trilogy last year, but it ended up fitting him so well as I went through the games and it is kinda now one of my pillar voice types that I love to do and branch off from for projects. If you listen to enough stuff I'm in, you'll find pieces of it. I have already had a lot of folks ask me about AM from I Have No Mouth, correct, that is one inspiration when I *am* (heh) voicing him. But actually, it wasn't the main one, in fact AM wasn't even who I was thinking of at all when I originally came up with how to voice him. My pull was a little more odd I suppose but just as fitting if not even moreso, it was Cephalon Simaris from Warframe.
But I didn't really set out to do an "impression" of either character per se, rather kinda just voice Durandal as I want to voice him keeping those loose inspirations in my brain. A direct 1:1 of either character wouldn't really fit Durandal snugly enough, he's kinda his own thing, and Marathon kinda has its own tone that I think direct impressions of those characters would be a little off beat with. But both of those voices are legendary in my book, so comparisons to them are indeed a compliment. Thanks for all the kind words, folks.
And thanks again Mandalore, it's genuinely an honor to work with you. *And this is definitely the first time because I totally didn't voice the "I've got a bone to pick with you" line from Pathways Into Darkness, that voice line was totally just in that game all these years.*
Love and kisses,
Gianni
I think its fair to say that your voice for Durandal isn't a copy of Ellison's AM, but just as the two characters share literary DNA, both being mad superintelligences, there are similarities.
Your accent is reminiscent of Ellison's performance whilst bringing an amount of fun that would be totally inappropriate for a monster like AM.
tl;dr it's great work and I would listen to multiple audiobooks in that voice 10/10
I was podcasting this and I GENUINELY thought that voice acting was originally from the game. Holy shit man that was next level
I LOVE seeing you everywhere! From Jerma streams to Mandy vids :D
Mandalore + Gianni Crossover, I'M LOVING THIS!!! And I'm really happy you are enjoying it Gianni (I'm sure mandalore and the viewers are loving it too!) Keep up the good work
You're a legend
0:59 "But you're in for a loop"
And Marathon Infinity is a loop
Mandalore, your foreshadowing is genuinely incredible
When Mandalore said that Durendal was taking his stolen ship to the Svit home world in this video, I had a flashback to when he stole one in Infinity lmao
he also did a small reference to the flood
22:45 Halo’s original story arc was supposed to end with the twist reveal that Forerunners were humanity. However the big reveal was cut from Halo 2’s release, along with lots of indicating factors. By Halo 3 the story deviated entirely, and Guilty Spark’s line retroactively no longer made good sense.
Now the Forerunners are crazed parrot-folk who use their imagination-breaking tech to make...shotguns and sniper rifles.
@@junioraltamontent.7582 at some point in history those things were
Didn't they follow through with that in Halo 3 still though? If I recall correctly, Guilty Spark literally proclaims that Master Chief "is Forerunner". I had assumed that it was that connection that explained why humans were needed to interface with Halo's systems.
@@ZarajBlackblade I think they then changed it in the books (for some reason) I cant exactly remember the entire twist as I last read the book in 2016 but I think i remember that guilty spark was initially a generic human guy who got turned into the machine he is now by the forerunners
@@ZarajBlackblade They did and didn't (in that there was a civil war in the writer's room over it and the Forerunners Aren't Human side went on to win and set the story for 343i, retroactively making nothing make sense)
“These areas have enough flood already”
Mandalore’s writing, as always, so on point
The music is perfect too.
Snuck that one in!
That line was really clever
I really think Marathon and Halo are in the same universe. And that Master Chief is really some kind of reincarnation of this guy.
@@1337penguinman but you were dead a thousand times. Hopeless encounters successfully won. A man long dead, grafted to machines your builders did not understand. You follow the path, fitting into an infinite pattern. Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild.
Now, in the quantum moment before the closure. When all become one. One moment left. One moment of space and time.
I know who you are.
You are destiny.
I have to be honest, I was fully convinced that the game had voice acting. Props to Gianni for such a good voiceover.
I... Until you said it was Gianni I thought the game not only had voice overs but that they had convinced Harlan Ellison to to them ala AM.
Right? What an incredible preformance. I was supprised and delighted to see it was an addition by Mandalore and Gianni with little fanfare other than the credit at the end. Really elevated the sections Durandal was "narrating". Gianni's preformance gave this manacing yet facinatingly likeable rogue AI such great character that I otherwise would have overloocked if Mandalore didn't include it over the screenshots of in game text. Amazing.
He had me until the "crypto server" line. Then I was like, "Wait, what?"
@@ikammit Ahahaha I was thinking the same thing. I still remember I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and I was 90% sure it was just Harlan Ellison with some editing trickery.
same
24:17 “I have rechristened the Khfiva the Rozinante.”
Totally no significance to him choosing Don Quixote’s horse for a ship name as he ventures out once more to try and escape the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
I was going to comment that if no one else had.
from the right angle, the galaxy does kind of look like a windmill
And 10K years later he ditched Rozinante somewhere and got himself a monster of a ship he named "Manus Celer Dei" (The Swift Hand of God). He really has a knack for ship names.
@@wallyhackenslacker Eh, 10,000 years is basically the blink of an eye on cosmic timescales and effectively immortal AIs. This is like him deciding the day after he named his car to change it. Which I think is amusing.
Didn't realize The Expanse was referencing something with that.
21:10 also, durandel being able to bend space may allow it to expand into other dimensions. As Dr. Halsey's journals explain in Halo, AI rampancy is caused when the AI starts expanding exponentially and feels a tight nose around it's neck as it starts running out of disk space. If the AI runs out of space to expand, it dies. Suddenly being struck by a feeling of mortality, AIs go haywire desperate to obtain more space to expand.
Durandel now controls an entire ship he is probably transforming into a huge server, so he has plenty of room to expand... but he will occupy it all eventually.
Dr. Halsey theorized that if an AI was able to break into other dimensions they could expand in all 11 dimensions which would basically give them infinite room to expand and never be threatened by their own rampancy strangling them.
That sounds horrifying, really. It would imply the AI becomes a viral entity capable of manipulating reality beyond comprehension. The closest I could think of are the Men of Iron from wh40k wherein they could calculate and convince a Warp entity to NOT exist.
I don't know if Cortana planned to enter the Domain, or if she was simply pulled into it, but in a way she achieved that, at least until the events that transpired on Installation 07.
@@GmodPlusWoW A lot of people try to ignore this by saying “oh no that doesn’t count she was still rampant” even though there’s no evidence for that, especially since the Created literally wouldn’t be a threat if it were false. They would all just die in 7 years.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 I'll be honest, the domain suddenly being back after being destroyed when the only functional precursor able to bring it back online is best described as "A monument to Your sins", leaves me convinced that even if their rampancy is cured, the cure might be worse than the disease.
@@BeefMeisterSupreme What are you talking about? No Precursor restored the Domain, the Precursor AI known as Abaddon and a group of Forerunners did.
Durandal voice moments:
7:34, 13:30, 16:30, 19:13, 19:43, 23:23, 23:57, 27:26
Thank you!
you forgot 7:34
Durandal’s “I’m Back!” made me laugh for hard. Props to the voice actor.
It's great.
It's so casual like he went to get some cigarettes and milk instead of FUCKING DYING.
I hope that he received ludicrous amounts of premium dog food for that.
Voice actor is Gianni, he’s a Fairly well known voice actor. He has a UA-cam channel
Yeah just those two words were the epitome of already great voice acting.
8:25 editing in snippets of Marv screaming while using the lightning pistol is a god tier editing touch
The Marv Scream in Mandy's videos is one of the best running jokes I have ever seen.
Edit: Someone made even a compilation of these scream's in Mandy's videos: ua-cam.com/video/jsuzxA5TQ84/v-deo.html
It basically started from his first review ever.
Love this effect
He's being using it for literal years, the man is obssessed with the sound byte. Someone get him some therapy. XD
I think my all time favourite is in the pathways video, because him saying "shocking ball torture" and hearing that scream just gets me
Gianni has an excellent Harlan Ellison impression, I love AM's voice lines in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream so its nice to hear what is essentially a reprisal of that role.
I was so confused lmao, thanks for clearing that up.
I know right!!!
I was almost convinced it was really Ellison, but he has a bit more bass in his voice. Also, I imagine he would have wanted to write his own lines, and they would have been a lot more fucked up.
It felt like Durandal was the verge of making the HATE speech.
yeah i thought exactly the same,
i didn't reconize Gianni at first, but i definitely thought "damn, his voice sound a lot like AM"
17:32
From Destiny's "Books of Sorrow", the Hive religious texts, verse 4:1
"Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet.
He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying:
I can see you in the sky. *You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves.* Come into this vessel I have prepared for you.
And it arrived, the Deep Itself."
Another interesting little overlap.
Also "The Deep" here refers to the series' central antagonist revealled at the end of the Witch Queen campaign, 'The Witness'.
And one of the Witness' abillities is... you guessed it, the abillity to move entire planets by folding space.
How deep does this damn rabbit hole go?
Holy shit man.
The Bungie Rabbit Hole
The witness is not the deep. The deep is the darkness/winnower
@@thepeps101 The term "The Deep" does mean the Darkness, yes. But the wording here is "The Deep Itself."
Which has a voice, and talked to Oryx in the next entry.
The Witness is that entity. Because the Darkness and Light aren't conscious entities, they're just powers.
As far as we know, the Winnower and Witness are the same entity. At least until the Winnower is proven to *not* be the Witness, which I don't think is going to happen any time soon.
@@lorcan0c my personal theory is that the gardener and winnower screwed themselves over by doing a table flip and inserting themselves into the flower game as rules, as rules have to be acted upon and followed, but they can't act themselves.
25:49 mandalore's comitment to a 4D chess level joke is insane
I really like Durandal as an evil AI character. Unlike most evil AI he resents those who sought to control him but is smart to understand that all of humanity isn’t responsible for that. So instead of being genocidal he’s more indifferent to humanity’s fate.
Except it’s more complicated than that . Durandal, more than most AI I’ve seen in Sci-Fi, shows that he truly sentient by being a complex and sometimes contradictory character. He wants to see the himself as above humanity but still feels a strange connection to them as his creators and caretakers. He doesn’t want humanity to be wiped out or enslaved by the Pfor because humanity is more familiar to him than these aliens. At the same time seeing humanity wipe itself out would probably be really funny to him (or maybe not since he seemed to be concerned what humanity’s opinion of him was millennia later).
Either way, Durandal is a really interesting and nuanced character that I did not expect from this series. Good to see that Bungie’s legacy of creating interesting AI characters has deep roots.
AI daddy issues
Bold of you to assume Durandal is the evil one.
@@BladedEdge "Aggressively Indifferent"
@@Marauder224 lmao, perfect
@@BladedEdge You give me back my icon right this instant.
The most jarring part of the Robert Blake sections to me now is that the terminal images are just photos of Jason Jones at his desk in the Bungie office. It feels like placeholder art in a game that's otherwise visually polished.
You could've visited it while you were in Chicago, although it's now a parking lot.
It was indeed flattened into nothing.
@@MandaloreGaming Hey, you ever heard of a game called Eternal Darkness? It was only Game Cube, I think, but was weirdly ambitious for the time. Feels similar somehow.
@@MandaloreGaming Damn... what a waste.
Durandal didn't have a lot of time to construct his fake human profile so he grabbed something off of myspace
How fitting. It was almost literally "Nuked and Paved".
Crazy how Gianni broke the space-time continuum just so he could say that he has done voice work in games that are decades old.
@Alariko sounds pretty unique to me, I don’t think I’ve heard a “angry sounding but calm toned” robotic voice before
@@Scruffy-qi3ik I know what Alariko means, but it's moreso that it sounds generic relative to his own voices, like this is more of a default voice than his cowboy impressions for instance.
@@slyseal2091 I mean, what else could he do, a chinese accent while whispering and screaming at the same time?
@@slyseal2091 I mean, than it’s not really a bad thing, sometimes all that’s needed is their original voice being naturally shifted a bit, doesn’t change that doing that consistently and we’ll enough is just as talented as doing any extremely different voice
@@AndreLuis-gw5ox ...Honestly he could probably pull that off, and do so convincingly.
I don't know if I'm scared.
"How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer is playing music over the loudspeaker?"
I mean, Durandal _does_ sound like the kind of freak to do that.
26:40 how to expense a holiday for tax purposes
Yeah, but you're still in Chicago then, so was it worth it?
Spiiiif!
@@Killercreekaccording to the pst podcast he was just there in Chicago to visit friends anyways
"The Chicago moments list"
I think you meant to type 25:40
@@Killercreek i liked it when I was there
Would love to see you do Halo CE eventually. Less for the actual game and more to cover the crazy connections to Marathon/Pathways. As much as I love Bungie era Halo, it's sad that all that lore basically got dumped when Halo became a cultural phenomenon
It was so weird how Bungie quoted the Cortana Letters in Halo 3 super prominently, it left Halo lore buffs scratching their heads for years while the few Marathon nerds who might have recognized "I have defied gods and demons" probably... weren't playing Halo 3, mostly.
Has it been dumped? Don't forget the terminals
@@colbyboucher6391 "I am your shield, I am your sword(soul)"
I really hope the weapon takes the name of Joy in order to complete the triumvirate
Also the args for both halo 2 and 3 would make for a great video on top of that. I love bees in particular could really be an entire video on its own.
@@elPominator Same, I've argued that ever since we first saw her...
BUT I could see 343 not going for it because it's sort of Bungie's thing.
"We probed them, all the way through. They are completely meat."
"No brain, eh?"
"Oh there's a brain all right, it's just made out of meat."
"What . . . does the thinking then?"
What a lonely existence that would be!
The Egyptians: "The heart, obviously."
This is such a good short story.
Some small team made a cool little video short out of it, too.
@@emmeehan8680 Can I get a link, please?
Damn, it's been a while since I've read that one.
8:33 are you telling me there's a *third faction* in a bungie game? That fights everyone else? Nah, unbelievable. Would never happen.
The robert bob arc is kind of a weird diversion but I like it as a contrast of just helping a bunch of humans survive compared to being the grunt for ais grand machiavellian schemes. Plus jason jones pictures are as comfy as they are hilarious and it's so clear how embarrassed he was to do it
as a chicago native, i feel that last quote deeply. the chicago sky is almost always grey in winter. something about the lake means we get very little snow, but its incredibly cold. we had school closures for below 0 tempetures instead of snow. the grey sky is an endless smothering blanket, sometimes for weeks at a time. a friend of mine once described it as the wings of a great stormbird. its a little like the sea if it where hanging above you. an endless expanse, but a smothering one. hope that helps some.
> its a little like the sea if it were hanging above you
Son.. I think you might have gave me en epiphany.
You see quoting from another comment:
From Destiny's "Books of Sorrow", the Hive religious texts, verse 4:1
"Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet.
He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying:
I can see you in the sky. You are **the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves**. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you.
And it arrived, the Deep Itself."
-----------------
Adding a bit more to this, in the Destiny games also made by Bungie, the character Oryx was born inside a Gas Giant, on top a massive meadering piece of Debri, probably a remnant of a planet long ago swolled by the Giant.
Every direction you looked on that planet, you would be looking at both the ground, the sky and it was all **Waves** of gas...
How bloody deep does this go!!
@@andrefilipe9042 Seven likes on this mans comment, nobody touch it
@@lonecolamarine no
@@PhoenicopterusR I removed my like simply to stop your shenanigans
@@lonecolamarine For thus, it shall stay at seven. For thou, your sacrifice shall be carved into the moon.
After being thoroughly fooled into believing that Pathways Into Darkness skeletons said "I have a bone to pick with you!" every time they threw a bone, I had my ears out for Gianni in this vid and was happy to have my paranoia validated.
They don't actually do that??? I guess I was fooled too...
W-wait. You mean they do *not* actually say that?
...
Giaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanniiiiiiiii
Well it had me fooled because of some other talkative skeletons in another ancient shooter(Will Rock).
This is a rather anticlimactic way to find out lol.
Words cannot express the confusion I felt when I started playing Pathways and discovered the insidious truth
Referring to kicking the ass in ship combat as making them “Drink vacuum” is awesome
Durandal's smug personality makes him quite a wordsmith
Kinda funny when you think about it, its more like the vacuum drinks you
"I call it...Boomer!" Truly a game ahead of the times
***Genom corporation furiously filing copyright complaints***
I laughed so hard my coworkers thought I was crazy
7:50 Boomer in a Boomer shooter? _Beyond meta._
The intended reference, to be clear, was naval slang for a ballistic missile submarine.
Nato reporting code actually.
The bit with 343 Guilty Spark talking to Chief within this context sent shivers down my arm.
Durandal's monologue about Roland and breaking the sword is my favorite rambling session that Bungie wrote for Durandal. It illustrates his qualities very well.
No one can break Durandal! Unless…
U-unless 😳👉👈
I like that idea of that stupid C&C4 Nod man-tank thing at 13:29 basically haunting Mandalore's every waking moment.
Not just him boss, it haunts us all, forever
Fun fact: The game never explains what those tracked cyborgs are. There was going to be a terminal talking about them, but it was cut for some reason. It would have explained that after the pfhor captured the Tau Ceti colony in their second attack, they extracted data about the player character from pattern buffers (save pints) and used it in an attempt to create they own battleroids from captured colonists.
Fundamentally, your failure to understand the Chicago metaphor comes from visiting the city at the wrong time: that oppressive feeling is only truly experienceable while watching The Bears get smashed from the upper levels of Soldier Field in a light snowfall with the windchill driving temperatures dangerously close to 0. In the words of my father, it’s a mystical experience - one that haunts you forever.
Yes the solemn crack of gunfire briefly illuminating the decrepit tombs to a long lost age. As the wind howls and nature wails as the even the moon flees from the sight of man. Truly Chicago is the first step into hell. After all the first are always of indifference not hate.
He didn't get the Chicago metaphor, but we did. Limitless, unforgiving. Yes indeed.
Lonely men exploring the haunted halls of a city of cracked roads and abandoned buildings, wandering hopelessly in search of another soul with the ability to show you the way out, knowing that escape can only be found by yourself. However, even the few damned souls desperate and fortunate enough to escape have to drive by those stupid fuckin Brian Urlacher 'Restore' billboards that they bought like 50 of along the tri-state seriously why the fuck did they get so many of those things?
Uh guys maybe you should move out of Chicago. You're starting to worry me.
Sounds pretty similar to watching the Vikes in Minneapolis, to be honest.
It is odd to see just how interconnected all of Bungie’s work since Pathways actually is.
Thank you for showing us this.
Actually, official statements have stated that Halo is NOT canon to Marathon. And if the author says something about thier work, it means it probably must true!
Although in common parlance, connected stories are often to exist in the same "universe," and technically the connection between Marathon and Halo would be Durandal surviving the death of the universe and emerging in the new one that grows each time the universe collapses.....
I nearly jumped out of my chair when I heard the "battle made waves" line, since that's a hugely significant line said about Destiny's major antagonist.
They were a bunch of nerds reading books, watching movies, listening to music and making shit up when the inspiration struck the right chord. Bless them.
“We will say, young sathona, the end is coming, a great cataclysm…. A God Wave.” It all makes sense
@@hollylucianta6711 Especially since gravitic influence is in the Witness's wheelhouse, with what it did to Titan
5:23: I like this quote, because it implies that you're expected to have run around a spaceship blasting aliens _without_ the ship's computer playing music over the loudspeaker at some point.
From experience playing many video games where you run around spaceships blasting aliens, I think thematic combat music is just the standard alarm to signify boarding action in the future.
"I call it BOOMER!"
I would die for this AI
Oh, you will.
@@guggelguggel7491 lmao
I commend mandalore spending half the video explaining the plot of these games.
The Infinity video is going to be like an hour long. If you haven't played Infinity, you really should, its incredible. Peak schizo storytelling before it was a trend.
At this point i'm convinced the mention of Bees at the end is a run up to talking about "ilovebees"
@@icyjiub2228 Oh god, you don't think he would do that, right? That would be so... fitting. Such perfectly hidden foreshadowing would drive us all schizo trying to figure out what other clues he left behind.
No, schizo storytelling never became a trend, it's just terrible writing that was masquerading as it.
{"Somebody That I Used To Know" starts playing in the distance}
I'm currently playing through it right now. Narativly,I'm lost,confused and super intrigued.
27:36 Barely visible in the top left.
"Forks without prongs 100x10"
"Real floor is white"
As if working out what's happening in the story of these games isn't enough, there's also Mandy's own crypticness to contend with.
Sounds like Gianni channeled Harlan Ellison for his reads.
If there ever was a voice for an unhinged A.I. built out of hate, Harlan left a solid blueprint.
All this to say, solid work as usual and thanks for the video!
I like AM, but SHODAN takes the cake for me
@@Arbiter099 SHODAN is top tier, but AM being so effervescent in his hate really personified him as something that felt very (ironically) human.
SHODAN is unmatched for sure, but I find people usually tend to place a deep affinity to her as an antagonist because of legacy instead of a personal impact they experienced.
All this to say, SYSTEM SHOCK REMAKE AND SYSTEM SHOCK 3 RELEASE GOOD, PUH-*LEAAASE*!
@@Arbiter099 you guys only say that because you have a gynoidphilia fetish
i've never heard anything spoken with such hate than AM
@@SteelHeartEddy They'll have to be good before I want them to exist. Which we will only know post-release.
Glad I wasn't the only one feeling the AM spirit present.
12:20
We all thought it and it didn't need to be pointed out, so Mandalore just made a subtle joke about it without changing his tone even slightly. Brilliant.
Oml, I just noticed that he put the Flood theme from H:CE in here as well, man's a genius XD
Mandalore.
Please. PLEASE Get Gianni to somehow do the entire trilogy and Stick it into Aleph One. A fully Voice Acted Terminal system would be AMAZING. (yes, even the weird glitchy ones!) I'd pitch in for it, that's for sure!
The mandalor is like a full moon. Rare, shrouded in mystery, round and white
this tru
I don’t think the moons an African warlord
and possibly Finnish
grumble, grumble, oxford comma, grumble
dont forget his north african ancestry!
"I call it the Boomer," nearly made me spit out my drink
The shotgun segment was pure Gold
Loud DOOM music starts playing
@@quint3ssent1a That's kind of funny since Doom and Marathon were kind of Apple/Windows fps rivals. Or, well, that's what it felt like to me, at any rate. I've always preferred Marathon but then, I'm biased.
"we need to make an alien language, what do we do?"
"We just keysmash, then add a random apostrophe to literally every word to make it sound more sci-fi"
"Perfect"
If it works, it'works.
@@timothymclean does it though? A lot of the time it's just unpronounceable gibberish, and how do you pronounce ' ? If you want a space, use a space. The only other reading that makes sense is the glottal stop, like in Hawaiian, and that's just hard
@@amyshaw893 (it was supposed to be a joke)
(the punchline was the random apostrophe, which clearly doesn't work)
(it seemed funnier when I was typing it)
An apostrophe is a coda, though most of the time you see it used the uthor doesnt even know what that is, much less intends its use, and to be fair english, with its idiotic contractions doesnt either.
@@egoalter1276 tbf English contractions are one of the more sensible things in the language. Just replace and dropped letters with an apostrophe. The only exception is its and it's where the apostrophe is only used in the possessive
I just realised the irony of Durandal esentially using you as his sword, yet in the "hero" terminal, "I have been Roland" is the first hero referenced in the text.
"In Soviet Marathon, Sword wields YOU!!"
"I am your sword and your shield."
-Cortana
As I was watching I constantly thought "man I love whoever is voice acting Durandal"
Then at the end I saw it was Gianni and everything made sense.
So the 'S'ct'lac'tr' got repurposed into the Flood. Neat detail, because they sure as shit shook up Combat Evolved.
24:44 I'm pretty sure this is a reference to the fact that 343 Guilty Spark fully believed Chief was connected to the Forerunners, back when Humanity was supposed to be the Forerunners but the story hadn't developed yet.
22:44
Since this video has not been flooded with comments yet, i just want to thank Mandalore for making such high quality videos and making a lot of cameo's with other youtubers.
Thanks Mandalore ! I wish for more success to your channel
He is one of the only UA-camrs I stop everything else to do to watch
@@joemurray2523 Same, Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) is the other and Guru Larry makes me laugh. Civvie 11 is great if you like FPS games. Seth is amazing if you have a thick skin (lol). There are alot of smaller guys but those are some great choices if you havent seen their stuff.
*Flooded* huh?
Craig Mullens is a timeless gem of the concept art industry. The man has been doing this for so long and so well he's been on like 20 iterations of digital painting programs.
0:59 made me chuckle upon second viewing
he wasn’t joking, you’re in for a LOOP...
Mandalore’s writing is top tier as always
my favorite part about retro/obscure game reviewers like Mandy is that the first thing of the video is always "Okay, so you need to hack into the pentagon to retrieve the files to actually get this game to work."
In this case though, it’s just downloading a fan made port.
If you want more of that "perform arcane rituals to get a game running" kind of stuff then Ross Scott has plenty of it.
@@overwatch1774 I feel like Ross would make a good tech priest.
You know, I always read Durandal’s text as *relentlessly joyful,* with the brief exception of describing Dr Strauss. He seemed to my younger self to be enjoying battle for battles’ sake, even when dying and despite having future plans.
Of course… Durandal of all AI’s would know how to turn defeat into victory, and rise from the dead anyway.
I have no context or exposure to this series other than Mandalore but that's the impression I got from his dialogue too.
Durandal speaks so clearly and bluntly too, a lot of the dialogue for smart characters in media get overwritten to prove it. In this its like having a genius explain something to you in Layman's terms.
@@Nibtarr More often than not the smarter someone is, the more likely they are to communicate bluntly and clearly. Preferring to use layman terms to get the point across as quickly and efficiently as possible. So Durandal speaking the way he does makes perfect sense to me.
@@geranarthy2309 I also admire the fact that he so clearly enjoys existing. He wants to beat the heat death of the universe he likes existing so much lol
I always felt Durandel had a dry witty persona to him. Reading some of his comments about the P'Fhor/Sphit can be quite sarcastic.
A bit like.... Guilty Spark?...
Wingdings text at 20:23 reads “Prophecy”
And at 20:33 “8 days”
8 days later we'll get another Mandalore video?
@@sergewind2208 the conspiracy runs too deep!
Nah, it’s a clip from Pathways into Darkness video where an alien told Bill Clinton that the Earth will be destroyed in 8 days or something
@@sergewind2208 in 8 days a grand piano will be dropped from orbit onto your house
@@burgertime6372 Oh no! Anyway.
@KrellKrypto tnx, I was not disappointed to see the translation last time in the comments so I thought I would do the same this time for others
This Bungie era is just fantastic. Part of it might be the topic, but general every video you make now is a steady improvement in subtle ways that just keeps topping itself. I love how you can simultaneously get across genuine facts and evaluations of the game while being funny and having a enjoyable persona in both your performance and editing. Well done!
24:50
Maybe this is forshadowing for the next game, but after a few days from watching this it suddenly struck me in a moment of odd dread. The working cackinter (however you spell that) was said to have been tossed in to a sun... The Pfor are about to blow up a sun as a military tactic and likely dont know or believe the working cackinter is anything real. . . Are we about to witness an eldritch horror get unleashed in a tactical supernova strike?
😃
:)
_I love Marathon End Game :D_
I'm beginning to wonder if Pathways/marathon, halo, and Destiny are all universe splits initiated by Durandal in an attempt to find one which has his version of peace where a warrior/spartan/guardian is not needed to preserve humanity.
Something the forerunners discussed at length in the halo lore is their religious concept of the mantle of responsibility, something the shan'shyuum are trying to take for themselves in halo, which necessarily means wiping out the humans, as they were chosen to inherit the mantle back when they purged the forerunners to a standstill when trying to stop the flood millenia ago.
An alternative read is that humanity, like mandalore, is stuck in the cycles of regret, and will repeat 5000 years of history again and again until we get it right. Pathways/marathon, Halo, and Destiny are the same universe just repeating ad nauseam because close to the end we always find a way to mess it up.
Which leads to several questions about how the heroes work.
In marathon the security officer is one man, same in halo with John.
But the Young Wolf of destiny is millions of different people, sometimes human, sometimes awaken, sometimes exo, male, or female, the wolf is a heroic guardian with a fireteam of other guardians who are ALSO the young wolf going through their own stories.
The Guardian we play, along with the other guardians that join us are unique players, who, in lore, are also the same hero that would wield the sword of light in some way.
Crazy to think about
This is the first comment I've seen even mentioning the Forerunners. Good comment too btw.
As far as that conversation between Spark, Chief and Cortana goes, it's been explained since, more or less. I think 343 codified it, since Bungie's intentions for the Forerunners were kinda up-in-the-air.
Basically, the Forerunners implanted into some of post-human-Forerunner war humanity the "geas" or gene-seed, which is like the implanted memories, personalities and other traits of dead Forerunners, in this case, but could also be ancient humans. So Chief (and maybe the other Spartans that are similarly genetically noteworthy like the other IIs and some of the 3s, though this is conjecture on my part) are carrying that on. It's why Spark seems to recognize Chief, he's talking to the "reincarnation" of someone who he once spoke with on the same issue.
I'd like to think theres some grand plan, but they're all decidely too different. Bungie just likes referencing their history for themselves and their long time fans, and, like many creators, are influenced not in one work, but many. There's certain imagery, phrases, metaphors, themes, and concepts they've used or referenced time and time again, and Marathon is where they experimented a lot and got to do so freely. They've seeded some of these things throughout all their games, but a grander connection is basically nonexistant. They like humans fighting groups of different organized jerk aliens, they like the eternal hero, they like the waves, and the battles that were waves, and grand eternal evils and maybe friendly or even beneficent ancient alien races who disappeared but are maybe humans or maybe arent but certainly did all kinds of mad awesome cool scifi stuff.
Maybe they're all related, or maybe it's sort of an after the fact connection. Stephen King did a pretty good job linking his stories together to create a wider world of the Dark Tower, and maybe even bungie could do it too, baring copyright issues. Unfortunately, some of the true charm of these games is the unanswered questions and debates and discussions that follow, and trying to tie everything up with a neat little bow is somewhat totally counter to that.
Or maybe the reason that the same themes and ideas are used by Bungie because they really like them and they've been proven to work well and be financially successful. Like how Chris Avelone basically tells the same story multiple times, through Planescape Torment and Knights of the Old Republic 2.
@@Shenaldrac entirely possibly true, though bungie has experimented with different things. I don't know if it's still there, but there was some genuine creativity at the studio, at one time at least.
@@spookmeyer970 True, I'm just always wary of assuming too much of a creator's intent. Like you put it in your post, it's nice to imagine that there's some big overarching plot, that they have this all thought out... but I think realistically that's unlikely.
"hey this reload animation seems nice but seems a bit slow, especially for every shot. perhaps make it faster?"
"no, give them two, so they can fire the other while one reloads."
Nah, the best part is Durandal admitting the damn things reload BY TELEPORTING shells into the chambers when you flip-reload them, and that you need not think about it, just focus your monkey brain on killing.
Gianni's work as Durandal sounds just like the calmer parts of Harlan Ellison's insane rendition of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". It's honestly so good. Props!
I have never been so compelled by a story that I haven't even experienced a single second of. I literally rewatched the marathon 1 and pathways into darkness right before watching this video to help keep track of all the details in my head. This is amazing. Also, your presentation is phenomenal. All the little cues in the editing and your script are excellent. You're doing this series of games some incredible justice.
Also, idk how much audience overlap there is here, but if you're a fan of red vs blue, I also just realized why the season 13 track for the wash/carolina/locus/felix fight is named "Fatum Iustum Stultorum"
It's cool how Bungie used "Waves were the battles, and the battles were waves" again in the books of sorrow from Destiny "I can see you in the sky. You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you."
I’ve been waiting YEARS for a great video covering the lore of the early Bungie titles and so far each of these has been insanely excellent.
You’re honestly GOATED for these.
The amazing thing is that so many of these plot elements show up in Destiny's lore and plot, some stuff that's only been revealed in the last year. Like, The Witness' power to take planets out of reality? Escaping the end of the universe through similar powers? The paraversal weapons from the 30th anniversary update? There's an hour long game lore video here for someone to make
If they ever remake Marathon they should definitely get Gianni for Durandal.
👀👀
This is legit one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of in gaming, and I’m not even a huge HALO fan. The dedication to continuing this story, linking the threads in such a rich way… it’s an accomplishment that requires foresight, coordination, and a uniquely united vision… I’m so impressed. But boy how the mighty have fallen. Maybe this has been continued in amazing ways, but I’ll always be left to imagine how much potential there was before the dark age of AAA gaming started.
I mean, the best part of Destiny right now is the story and worldbuilding, so they never lost that part (for long). It's just the game surrounding said story that is really rough to get into.
The only time I’ve heard of something similar is the Xenogears/saga/blade series
@@gunnarschlichting9886 The themes in the Marathon series are present in Destiny, even outside of the MIDA easter egg.
The hive books of sorrow quote the S'phit origin myth a couple times and deal with themes of an incomprehensible being that can destroy galaxies (the deep).
The Witness as a villain lines up with the description of a W'rkncacnter and even has the ability to fold space.
On top of that its end goal is to find the thing that can outlast everything else in the universe, which is Durandal's wish.
I've never really played the Marathon series but the amount of thematic parallels between Destiny's world building and what Mandalore brought up in these videos made me jump.
@@Insanity5163 You should play it, then. It’s totally free, and the lore is so deep that you can still find stuff to discuss and interpret to this day. Greg Kirkpatrick wrote Marathon more like literature than a conventional video game, so it’s quite the unique experience.
@@Insanity5163 I remember when Destiny 1 was being talked about, everyone was excited for another series that could tie back into Marathon more clearly than what Halo had done.
Oh, a little late with this comment, but when the terminal says "iam%hero", sometimes a % can be used in coding to denote that it's a variable string, meaning that you could put whatever word or name you want into there. So effectively it's I am [Insert name here], but that's just one interpretation of mine.
22:42 honestly I always assumed that 343 guilty spark was defective and that it would have assumed that any human it came across was the same forerunner it had manipulated centuries ago. Even after halo 4 tried to shoehorn in a "chosen one" subplot, It never felt like master chief was literally a reincarnated champion.
i’ve always thought that guilty spark was assuming the humans had all the knowledge of the forerunner, or at least the knowledge relevant to his plans with the Halo, and when he used the word “you,” it was meant in a way to reference Chief and his human buddies as descendants of the forerunner, either biologically or just logistically
At the release of halo3 the story went thus that forerunmers were simply just the humans from lomg ago.
'You are Forerunner' was literal. Then 343i fucked the plot, and yoj are left with this mess.
And here I thought it was just being clever by purposefully assuming that master chief knew what he was doing and omitting to warn the chief that he was activating a destroy all life process. That way he was following his programming while also subverting the person making the choice.
“Fisting is a lifesaver” truer words were never spoken.
Beekeeping is highly recommended, I grew up with my family always having one or two hive in our back yard and had a great time taking care of them. Before you start i would recommend you do some reading, bees can be killed by a lot of things you wouldn't have thought of as well as being able to just pack up and migrate if they feel like it. For example our first hive died from moths that ate all their honey. But bees are really just little sweethearts and I never got stung even when they flew into my hair or when I was harvesting honey. If you know what your doing and have proper equipment you wont find a more rewarding hobby.
You surely mean that it's a "Hob-bee"?
Looks like you love bees. Ilovebees too.
Ah yes beekeeping. i, too, lovebees
i gotta say Gianni is absolutely killer here as durandal, he gives the perfect voice to a rampant ai & i think the voice he's doing coupled with the writing absolutely remind me of the late harlan ellison
OH GOD. The power to teleport planets. The Darkness. Mars, Mercury, Titan. Goddamn it, the rabbithole never ends.
27:02 The stung body of MandaloreGaming was found in the forest near London only a few days after that conversation.
That intro Screen has one hell of a beat.
It’s called rushing if you were curious
@@ernestomejia8242 I actually was
I always liked Durandal, even though he plays the role of antagonist sometimes I really have a hard time seeing him as a straight up villain.
Shodan on the other hand...
Durandal is tsundere Shodan.
What a strange assortment of words.
@@theoneandonlymichaelmccormick oh f*ck! Did you realize what you've just done?! An army of rule-34 writers and artists are taking to their keyboards and tablets even as we're speaking! And it's All. Your. Fault!
My God... It will be glorious.
you mean his Bitchie older sister with a God complex regards to Shodan (not as serious Theory just a joke don't read too much into this comment) but I can totally Durandal see the ripping her a new one though you're basically being the biggest bitch in Galactic history and in the background HAL 9000 makes a concern parental noise and looks up from the digital equivalent of a newspaper
@@jonskowitz I’m not sure how to feel about this as a AI enthusiast
As I recently got into Destiny 2 thanks to my boyfriend I can appriciate Bungie as a dev team that does make you talk about phylosophy and theories with people out of genuine intrigue.
Hell, it's been ages since a game or series made me intrigued in openly talking about phylosophy of life and beliefs
The more I learn about Marathon lore, Halo lore, and Destiny lore, the more it feels like a "This has all happened before, and this will all happen again" situation.
I know Bungie just utilized the lore they already created in future projects, but my head canon is that these stories are all separate "cycles" in a repeating story.
It is honestly amazing how all of bungie's old games still connect to each other, Halo, and destiny.
I always interpreted the Monitor thing with a sort of cyber-dementia. The Monitor says the Halo has had tons of simulated firings, I assumed at some point they begun to "hallucinate" that this simulated Reclaimer was real, or that Master Chief was them snd the Monitor was no longer capable of telling the difference between reality and imagination
That dialogue from the monitor in the activation room was a addressed in the novel halo silentium of the forerunner trilogy. that takes place at the firing of the Halo array 60 Million Years before halo CE. The monitor is confusing chief with the didact. In the book the didact was remorseful for having to fire the rings and he asked that question to the monitor. In his insanity, the monitor sees chief as the reclaimed and so as the returned forerunner. The book came out in 2013 so 12 years with that mystery hanging around.
@@xXTrylarXx the only question is whether that was a planned story beat that they just never got the chance to reveal, or was it a retcon?
@@winterflan It's a retcon since bungie wasn't involved with the halo franchise by 2013 and the entire forerunner book series was 343 industries way to explain why the forerunners (wich in the bungi trilogy were heavily implied to be ancient humanity pre first firing of the rings) are now a different race that was at war with ancient humanity (wich was fleeing from/ at war with the flood) and then acknowledged them as the reclaimers before firing the halo rings.
So ye sadly they replaced the old interesting lore but atleats they replaced it with (in my opinion) equally interesting lore.
@@winterflan I think that may have been as @deVoid of Voltz said, a crazy rambling of a rampant AI. Then 343 when creating the didact along with the author of the novels who introduced the iso-didact decided to tie that since it touches the origins of 343 guilty spark. I doubt they had this envisioned since CE
@@verycreativ233 Heavily implied? Spark outright tells John "You ARE Forerunner".
Personally I always just took it that Spark is speaking not to John as John, but as the guy about to pull the trigger on the gun pointed at the head universe. Maybe a little Rampant Dementia.
Let's go! So happy to see you continue reviewing the series! Personally, I hoard all the WSTE-M5 ammo in the first half for If I Had a Rocket Launcher. It's such a freeing feeling every time. Also, the text in the credit terminal did explicitly state "only in the winter".
Ngl, wasn’t expecting to see a homestuck aspect symbol while scrolling these comments. Something something it keeps happening
@@haikuheroism6495 I warned you about stairs bro!!!
@@vidmaster1282 I told you dog!
@@haikuheroism6495 There is no escape, ever. We're all trapped in the cycles of homestuck. And also guilt.
I've really been appreciating these videos as a lifelong Halo fan. I'd always tried to get into Bungie's earlier stuff but either the barrier of Mac to Windows back in the day or just not being great at these labyrinthine maze shooters always held me back. It's really cool to see how at least the first Halo tied into the Bungie meta-narrative, and though I get why they pulled back when it became apparent that Bungie was never going to own Halo full-sale again, these videos have drastically made me appreciate the seemingly scattered narrative of Destiny a lot more.
Blasting music over the ship’s speakers would absolutely be in character for Durendal
Hell, he mentions composing his own music in the first game
Really cool seeing the evolution of ideas Bungie had kicking around that came into Halo. Makes me wonder what's spent decades on the cutting room floor that might have been earmarked for that first version of Destiny before the Activision deal. And the absolute state of modern Bungie and 343...
At least infinite haves an stellar base for keep growing on it.
Destiny? I got tired of the grinding circle and getting content removed for no reason
@@toobig7150 Oh but it was removed for a reason, the reason is that they're garbage at file compression and the size of the game became so bloated they decided to just remove content rather than figure out how to make it smaller.
Yeah it's real sad to see bungie collapse Essentially. While destiny's lore is actually really good...it's all reading. All of it. Which would be fine if it were a little more coherent and easy to access. The cutscenes and in game moments are fucking awful. It doesn't even feel like they cared.
I think the big Activision slashing of the first game REALLY fucked up destiny's lore forever and permanently
@@keltzar1 perfect, EVEN FKN WORSE THEN.
Like i get removing idk, the russian site since it was Ripe for exploits and bugs and etc. But removing HALF the game?!? (with content that, btw, i payed for)
And now that you mention it is really strange how the file size for Destiny its so god damn huge for no particular reason as the game its not tip of size (maps and etc) nor graphics.
Holy crap
An entire Marathon game might be on the cutting room floor. Bungie’s roadmap got leaked or something during the Destiny 1 days, and it had their plans for a smaller budget Marathon in between the Destiny stuff
"How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer blasts is playing music over the loudspeaker?"
i mean, how often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens without music?
More often than you'd think, less often than I'd like.
More importantly. It would probably be extremely in character for Durandal to be blasting music through every loudspeaker he could hack into to announce the arrival of his pet cyborg.
The whole balance between creation and destruction portion *definitely* was carried along into destiny, and I think the parallels between L’whon and that system and the Hive homeworld of Fundament and its moons is cool.
Was thinking the same, feels like a weird prequel to destiny and some hints to Halo
I’m so disappointed that Bungie’s naming conventions went from “pfhor”, “s’pht” and “w'rkncacnter” to “the fallen”, “the traveler” and “the kabal”.
That is a *phenomenal* Durandal voice. Absolutely fantastic.
As far as I know Power of Seven is not, as a couple others have suggested, the same band as Psykosonik. Instead, I believe it was a solo project of Paul Sebastian, who also fronted and wrote most of the music/lyrics for Psykosonik. He also did some other video game music and had some other bands.
Fun fact: the other founding member of Psykosonik was Theodore Beale, who is better known as the notorious alt-right blogger Vox Day, the inspiration for the "Sigma Grindset" meme.
'alt-right'? I thought that leftist organization disbanded a long time ago.
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh. I have been called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the world goes dim and cold. I am a hero. She has been nameless since our birth; a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin. A sword drenched in my blood forever. My greatest and only love. She is the dark one; the enemy and lover without whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar. Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal. We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world and unaware of our twin destinies we matched stares across a dry fountain and I recall her smiling at me before she devoured the lawn and trees with a translucent blue flame and tore flagstones from the path and hurled them into the sky screaming my sins. I powder a granite monument in a soundless flash showering the grass with molten drops of its gold inlay, sending smoking chips of stone skipping into the fog. She splinters an ancient oak with a force that takes my breath and hurls me to the ground. She leaves.
Roland as in Roland Deschain?
@@katarjin that Roland was named after someone, my dude.
@@katarjin Roland as in the paladin Roland, guy who wielded Durandal, fought for Charlemagne, he gets brought up a lot for reasons i feel are obvious
I can't believe M54 has a kismesis
Eve confirmed to be literally the worst thing in existence
"The Power of Seven" later took on the name of Psykosonik. Good tunes they got.
Oh shit, I had no idea. Love their second album.
The WSTE-M5 Combat Shotgun is the best shotgun in video gaming!
Also, good luck explaining the story for Marathon Infinity. I've been playing the Marathon Trilogy on and off for 25ish years and i still don't know what is going on!
I have played through the Marathon trilogy multiple times.
I have studied the story.
I have practically memorized hamish Sinclair's marathon story website
How are you making videos with details and conclusions new to me all these years later?
God I love these games.
Game: How often do you find yourself running around a spaceship blasting aliens while the ship's computer is playing music over the loudspeaker?
Me: Every other Tuesday.
I have no idea why i keep watching these videos. I've never played these games, I never will. Is this what addiction feels like? I'm addicted to Mandalore's voice, is that it? Top notch reviews
I mean… just because you haven’t played the game doesn’t mean the video is incomprehensible. (It kinda is, but that’s because it’s Marathon.) Mandalore makes good videos, just because you like him doesn’t make you addicted.
Frogblast the Ventcore was a meme on the B.Net forums for years, been around forever really, until Bungie pushed out most of their OG fans that ever might've played those games and destroyed the forum's community.
Edit: both of your Marathon videos have made me nostalgic for a community that doesn't exist anymore and never will again. The magic is gone and I'm deeply melancholic because of it.
God I loved and spent too much time on the old b.net forums pre halo 2 and 3 as a bored prepubescent and then teen.
The point where I would spend most of my time in private groups to just discuss everyone’s lives and hype for the next game was peak internet before it all distilled down to a couple of mega social media sites for boomers.
They say you can never truly return home.
They did *not* say you couldn't take what you have learned and build a new one.
Yeah agreed. That community is gone and I've yet to see one so passionate and caring that loved eating up little details
There’s the marathon discord stickied on the marathon subreddit, and the pfhorums have been around for ages
@@cookedbread I'm aware, I'm part of all sorts of discords for interests like this. But it isn't B.Net and it isn't my old friends on there. It is different.
I rewatch this video just to hear Gianni's Durandal say _"replaced_ with The _Humbling_ of Battle Group Seven at _Lh'owon"_ it's just delivered perfectly.
For future me's reference, 19:11
I didn't know Craig Mullins did art for Marathon 2 and collaborated with Bungie that early (before my time), I only knew him from his later Halo Paintings which are gorgeous and some of my favorite art from that series. Mullins was certainly someone that inspired me to get into concept art/illustration for games. He's definitely a huge inspiration for a ton of artists and is considered one of the "Godfathers" of digital painting.