The SECOND Greatest Story in Gaming! HALO

hey folks some of you may remember a video i did a few years ago about what i consider to be the best story ever in any game it is the story of the clan war from 1995 to 1997 in the collectible card game legend of the five rings not the novels or the rpg the ccg and if you're wondering how a card game could even have a story let alone the best one i've ever been a part of well check out that video but we were hanging out on twitch talking about whatever which i do a couple times a week and someone asked okay what's the second greatest story in gaming and i was like i don't know i don't keep score i don't have a list or whatever i have i have no idea what the second greatest it's halo but not like the halo you know the billion dollar franchise that's been around for 20 years or whatever no this is the story of how we got there which begins in the dim pre-history known as the 1900s specifically the 1990s and back then i was in my 20s and i was working in tabletop rpgs and since i was in desktop publishing i was using a mac which was frustrating for me as a gamer because there just weren't games for the mac back then only two companies consistently made high quality mac games blizzard thank god and a tiny company in chicago called bungie bungie made a trilogy of killer games for the mat called marathon these were first person shooters set a few hundred years in the future where humans have colonized a few planets and you spend most of the game shooting aliens now this was the 90s so an fps was a lot more about resource management and puzzle solving than a modern fps which is primarily about reflexes and in the 90s teams just weren't that big bungee might have been less than 20 people in 1994 when the first game came out and there wasn't the technology or the budget to fully voice a game with all the characters having actors delivering lines there were a few lines of vo that npcs would say when they died and that was about it which means i don't think these games had a full-time writer who developed the characters and the setting i think the whole team contributed to the plot and the world building and it feels a lot more collaborative to me i could be wrong in marathon you play actually that is a good question there are no mirrors in these games the tech didn't support it and you had no vo and you never met any other human beings in the game since there was no vo for them to say no dialogue trees so who you are in this trilogy of games became more and more interesting at first you didn't even think about it you're a human soldier of some sort here to fight aliens but there was one other character you routinely interacted with or rather a series of characters and these are the ais the computers who run the giant spaceships the game is set on each ship had its own ai or i think each ship had three which might be a reference to destination void part of the fun for me of telling this story is not going back and doing a bunch of research but relying on my faulty memory so hopefully i can count on folks in the comments to correct the details these ais are hyper-intelligent way smarter than hal for instance and this is one of many nods to my all-time favorite science fiction series the culture books by ian m banks you know a lot of people like to say oh the halo is just uh it's just a ring world from larry niven's books and i do like these books and they do feature a ring world quite prominently but in point of fact i believe that there is a ring world in halo because there are ring worlds in the culture called orbitals is this a preview of the appendix m series yep sort of most people recommend starting with player of games because it is the least weird but i started with accession which is the most weird and as a result i loved it you know a big part of this book is reading a bunch of emails between these super computers which is perhaps not coincidentally what you end up doing for most of marathon there's no vo no dialogue trees but at dramatically appropriate moments you would find these computer terminals in the world and you'd read a message from one of these ais eventually one of these computers durandal goes insane which in the world of marathon is called going rampant and it results in the computers gaining almost god-like powers as they start to sort of see through the fabric of reality and you end up as a puppet of durandal he sends you around doing his bidding and you don't really have any choice in the matter and by the third game there is a lot of what my friend ken height calls high weirdness it's very cool and there are tons of literary references in their references to mythology it had a big impact on my writing and actually side note it had a big impact on my life because with the third and final game they released the tools they used to build their game anyone could now make marathon levels you could make an entire game if you wanted so when i was complaining about being bored at my tabletop rpg job in like 2003 or whatever a friend of mine who was the lead designer on mercenaries at the now defunct pandemic studios asked if i wanted to come work for him i was like yeah and i'm being interviewed by the project director and he says well you know jordy says you're the guy and that's good enough for me which was very cool the only time in my life i got a job by actually knowing a guy but he obviously felt weird just offering me a job signed unseen so he asks have you ever done anything video game related before and i'm not gonna lie i was like nope and then i remembered well i did design a bunch of levels for marathon and it turns out this dude was a huge marathon fan and he asked me what kind of levels and i talked about how i was running a sci-fi rpg campaign for my friends and i had this scenario for them that i realized i could probably do in marathon so i did and i recorded my own special effects i tweaked all the weapon values i made trigger volumes for events and he was like that's it that's what we do you're hired so thanks bunji anyway durandal is the villain of this series very cool character and on the fan forums or rather forum because as i recall there was really only one folks talked about the lore and we all discovered that durandal is named after one of the legendary magic swords of charlemagne from the matter of france charlemagne real dude who really lived but a body of myths grew up around him and this is where we get the idea of a paladin the paladins were charlemagne's knights and they had these magic swords made for them by oogie or the dane and one of them was called durandal or like durandata or something whatever it's old french you get it they make three games and wrap up the story and that was it they made another game a fantasy rts called myth the fallen lords which was very cool and still i think kind of forward-looking and this is another appendix m reference because just like their sci-fi game was heavily inspired by the culture their fantasy game was heavily inspired by the black company so you can see how i was sort of the target audience for all their nonsense myth was a lot of fun but folks really missed marathon and fans just kept bugging bungie for another marathon game and i remember one of the devs responded saying something like imagine a painting of a horse it's exquisite the detail the brush strokes and this horse is dead it's lying in a field surrounding it are several men with sticks all in the process of striking the horse's corpse in other words more marathon would be beating a dead horse okay fine point taken then the guy who runs the marathon fan site says hey i got this email it wasn't from anybody he knew but it was clearly from bungie he could see the ip address was from a bungie domain so this was an email coming from inside bungie and it was talking about this weird apocalyptic stuff what was going on then he got more emails from this character including emails that referenced his own commentary on the fan site this was weird then something very weird happened someone was rooting around inside an update to myth their fantasy rts and they found in the source code another message from this character it ends with the comment i'm still not sure what it is he saw in you in me what who saw he he who then someone thought to look up the name of this person at bungie sending these letters in either bullfinch's mythology or benay's reader's encyclopedia which i assume you all have on your desk and in one of these books in the section about charlemagne there is a quote talking about how when oggy or the dane pulled one of these swords out of the forge he was surprised to find written on the blade the following message i am cortana of the same steel and forged in the same fire as durandal and we ourselves the entire fandom which was not a lot of people went completely insane they were working on a sequel to marathon they were working on a new marathon game and we were talking to the a.i villain who eventually goes rampant and we thought we could tell that some of the emails were from before she went insane and some were from after and you think damn that's cool how come game companies don't do stuff like that anymore well they do in fact actually lots of them do we tried it with evolve but there was never a sequel alas anyway fast forward a little while and we're all watching steve jobs at mac world expo just bursting with pride and excitement because finally the mac had a real legitimate cutting edge aaa video game that was going to establish the macintosh once and for all as a legitimate gaming platform and it was bungie's game it was halo at mac world expo 1999 and we were dying to see it not halo combat evolved it was just halo and the trailer was like 10 minutes long and it was the coolest thing we had ever seen no game looked like this it was an fps but it had these vast outdoor maps and vehicles and squad based combat and complex ai and the characters were all fully voiced you could see their mouths move with the vo just a ton of stuff we had never seen before it looked like the future or sort of the past a little since it featured a bunch of characters who were transparent ripoffs of the colonial marines from james cameron's sequel to alien and we follow these marines as they explore an ancient alien ruin and then an alien with a laser sword just murks a guy and there's this epic running battle to get to the vehicle and then another battle between the vehicles as you race to the drop ship and the whole time the aliens are picking the marines off and eventually they make it to the drop ship but there's only one dude left he's wounded he's on the ground and this alien with like a four-lobed mouth is looking down at him and he has to twist its mouth to make our sounds and he says your destruction is the will of the gods and we are their instrument well that sounds very cool and ominous and like there's tons of lore to explore and then we cut to the marine who's got a grenade right he's gonna do the gorman death scene from aliens and then the alien gets a sniper round to the skull and collapses dead and we zoom way over to this soldier this bmx bandit looking dude with an alien sniper rifle right this guy who's apparently a good guy was out on his own killing aliens and he took their weapon and used it against them he walks up to the wounded marine who looks up at him and i will never forget this it was one of the most dramatic reveals in any story ever he says cortana said there was one of you on board i didn't believe her cortana said cortana cortana is the ais there ai and we're pretty sure she's gonna go insane but that obviously hasn't happened yet wait one of you is that me is that who you're playing is that who we've been playing the entire time throughout all these marathon games why are we something there's only one of why didn't he just believe her just just having one of these guys on a ship was like having a nuke stored away in secret or something i couldn't believe it i felt like a lot of people at bungie worked their ass off specifically to make us the marathon fans the true believers happy because that moment doesn't pack anything like the same punch if you're just a random apple investor at mac world expo i think that is one of the coolest narrative moments dramatic journeys i've ever been on and it wasn't even really in the game you know the l5r story wasn't really in the game either was all word of mouth convention reports flavor text on cards it wasn't all written down anywhere it still isn't halo remains one of the best games i've ever played it did not disappoint halo 2 was a dramatic improvement in every way except the narrative it was clear to me and i wasn't the only one that something had happened inside bungie you know they got bought by microsoft a bunch of the old guard took their money and went and started other studios or just left game development and the sequels all felt a lot more like a bunch of cool ideas and moments that didn't really fit together they tried to do something with halo 2 an augmented reality game that didn't seem very game-like to me and didn't really augment any reality as far as i could tell and also didn't have anything to do with halo as it turned out like in the first game they talked about the coal protocol a rule in the navy that no matter what do whatever you have to do to stop the covenant from learning the location of earth scuttle the ship if you have to just don't let them get those coordinates and that was dramatic it said a lot about the forces involved and what they wanted and how desperate the humans were and then nothing no halo 2 the coal protocol we assumed halo was supposed to be a prequel to marathon because in marathon you've got a human plasma pistol it's the only human energy weapon you can overcharge it and if overcharged it will take down the enemy shields and then halo has an alien pistol that does that but no human tech uses energy weapons so it seems like marathon is set after they reverse engineer the alien tech but only so far as making this one weapon but i think they dropped that idea pretty quick so i eventually checked out of that series i played some halo infinite and i really liked it i thought it was a worthy successor to those games and they hit a home run there i saw john carpenter yes that john carpenter praise halo infinite on twitter and my former co-worker who i really liked and whose lewis scripts i was always in awe of tom french responded to john carpenter and that's how i discovered tom is one of the creative directors at 343 and i actually got actually got a little emotional i was like man good job tom you did an unambiguously good thing man anyway that was halo back when halo was halo and no one thought it needed to be combat evolved these kinds of stories come up on twitch all the time i encourage you to come by there's no schedule but i stream once or twice a week actually we don't have something scheduled i'm going to be live this saturday morning at 11am pacific for a deep dive into the history and music of maybe my favorite band of all time genesis uh probably includes some peter gabriel in there we've done these for pink floyd and jethro tull and yes and we'll probably do one for rush you know my musical tastes uh have expanded somewhat since i was in college listening to all these bands but there really aren't any bands whose stories i know well enough to tell maybe i can get tom schmuck to do a deep dive into black sabbath who knows that's it folks thanks for watching let me know if you liked this video i love story time with uncle matt doesn't all have to be about d d until next time peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 111,302

Keywords:

Id: wI5hF_9h900

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Lusunati]

If you yourself are interested in playing Marathon, the developers released all the source and assets, and so some enterprising fans have released the source port - Aleph One -Here.

Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

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Cool video, i had about the Alternate Reality Game they were running with the emails and the source code. Thanks for sharing!

[u/YYZhed]

One detail was slightly wrong, and I only correct it because I love this detail.

There are other humans on Marathon. They're called The BoBs.

Because they've lived their entire lives on this ship. They were Born on Board.

All generic NPC soldiers dudes in games have been "BoBs" to me and my friends for like 30 years. The Marines in Halo were BoBs. "See if you can grab a BoB and take that warthog over that hill, see what you find". "I hit that elite with a rocket launcher, but I think I took out a couple BoBs too."

[u/randomfluffypup]

THE CULTURE! Reading it my first time, just finished inversion!

Honestly never had a book series grab me so thoroughly in years. I've never been the person who reads the 6 whole fucking books in one series, but damn I'm knocking these books out back to back.

This hasn't happened to me since I was a kid!

[u/Silidon]

That snap when he links the prior video is so crisp.

[u/ARi0S]

Speaking as a major Bungie fan, I always love seeing things from another perspective since I was too young to properly see those bits Matt talked about.

Something similar happened when Destiny, Bungie's newest IP, was in production. I was convinced that the newest AI would be named Joyeuse. Instead, we got Rasputin as the manmade AI. And the Augmented Reality Game of Dreams of Alpha Lupi, which introduced the players to the Traveler.

But, fun thing about Destiny, and its sequel, Destiny 2. Before, they implied a connection between Destiny and all of their other games. But the 30th anniversary confirmed them to be directly related, happening within the same Paraverse (their made up word for the thing above multiverse, sort of like how tesseracts are made of cubes, which are made of squares).

[u/MisterB78]

Makes me think of System Shock 2. It was so atmospheric and creepy...

[u/Paxonbaxon]

MATT COLVILLE CONFIRMED CULTURE STAN! We love to see it.

[u/adagna]

I cut my gaming teeth on the Marathon games, they were pretty niche I have never met anyone else in my personal life that has ever played let alone heard of the series of games. Glad to see them getting some love

[u/Drumfreak101]

So glad he made this! I remember him telling this story on stream, for what I think was the first time, and wishing I had archived it somehow. Just seems like a stellar bit of gaming history that I'm sure very few people know!