Marathon makes me think of the Michael Mann film Thief, where the eponymous hero, Frank, is coerced into working for the mob boss, Leo. Though tense and unfriendly, initially their relationship is at least somewhat mutually beneficial. Leo tips off Frank to lucrative scores, and takes a cut of what he earns. As the film goes on, however, Leo bores more and more into Frank’s life. He bankrolls the financing on Frank’s house. Rather than paying him in liquid cash, he invests Frank’s earnings in a property development in Texas. And when Frank and his girlfriend Jessie discover that they can’t have children, and get rejected by an adoption agency because of Frank’s rap sheet, Leo buys them an infant boy on the black market. Frank has a plan: one last job, then take his money and his family and start a new, straight life far away. But when Leo finds this out, he murders Frank’s best friend and has his men kidnap Frank and bring him to an abattoir. “Don’t you get it, you prick?” Leo lays into him. “You got a home, car, businesses, family, and I own the paper on your whole fuckin’ life. You do what I say. I run you. I want you workin’ until you are burned out, you’re busted, or you’re dead. You got responsibilities.”

So Frank throws out Jessie and his son, burns down his house, and blows up the bar and used-car lots that he uses as fronts. With nothing left to his name but a pistol and a flak jacket, he drives to Leo’s house and kills him and all of his soldiers. The film ends with Frank alone, walking into the night.

I fantasise about doing something like this in Marathon; burning everything down; taking every blue, purple, and gold-grade gun I own onto the roof of Flight Control and yelling ‘come and get ‘em!’ into the prox chat. If the horror of Marathon lies in the extent to which Arachne, Traxus, Sekiguchi, and the rest of the allegorical supercorporations own your runner (you pay them rent on your body) the only way to escape them and to wake up from the nightmare of—not even ‘capitalism’; something more primal than that; the very concepts of ‘money’ and ‘having stuff’—is to destroy everything that you (read: they) own. Don’t take their free kits. Don’t take their missions. Don’t be suckered into the idea that anything they say, ask you to do, or ‘give’ you is important. You can’t kill them—a metaphor for how unbridgeable the social gulf is between average schmo and billionaire, Marathon’s power brokers exist only in the abstract, speaking to you from the other side of the galaxy via incorporeal avatars. But you can reject their notions of what matters and what doesn’t. You can refuse to do what they expect you to do. That’s why you have MIDA!

Whenever you shoot an opposing player in Marathon, your hit marker will change depending on what grade of shield they are using. Seeing that an enemy is using a free-of-charge grey shield is an invitation to attack further and try to kill them, since they are weak. If a player is using an expensive and more-powerful purple shield, however, that effect is reversed—like the engorgeable flaps of skin on a lizard’s neck, the purple shield, and the hit marker it produces, are warnings to other players to back off. This person is experienced with the game, the purple shield says, and likely wields upper-tier weapons commensurate with that experience: they’ll mess you up. In this way, as well as delineating the material value of objects, Marathon’s colour-coding system identifies each player’s metaphorical social class. The game becomes an imbalanced dog-eat-smaller-dog world where the players with meagre loadouts are more likely to be murdered and have everything taken from them than those who are, within the game’s hermetic economic system, well off and affluent; the ‘poor’ of Marathon are softer targets for the game’s plutocratic violence than the ‘rich’.

But weaved into this aggression, opportunism and bloodthirsty enterprise (detailed further by Lewis and Yussef) are subtle inducements to community. Proximity chat means that, rather than universally and reflexively regarding all other players as enemies, you might also see them as would-be partners, with whom you may form temporary coalitions—it hasn’t happened to me personally, but there is extensive video evidence of ‘all-friendly Cryo lobbies’, where somehow fifteen players, divided among five oppositional squads, transcend the competitiveness indoctrinated by the game’s matchmaking system and organise a ceasefire, and cooperate to kill the Compiler boss and share between them the contents of the vaults. 

Marathon’s midseason update also introduces the C.A.R.R.I event, whereby performing acts of in-game altruism like helping your teammates complete contracts or exfilling with other players in a solo lobby grants you commendations that are exchanged for gear. And then there’s the Mercy Kit, which transfigures Marathon’s ostensibly competitive dynamic entirely, since it lets you revive enemies. Now, shooting a player until they need a revive is not necessarily an act of violence but instead one of incipient diplomacy; you can safely approach a knocked player, explain to them on prox chat that you’d rather collaborate, and, if they’re willing to honour a truce, help them back to their feet. Taken in aggregate, these mechanics tease the possibility of a kind of pacifist version of Marathon. Like the nuclear disarmament in Metal Gear Solid V online, which demanded that every player on a regional server relinquished their ICBMs, and then rewarded them with a bonus cutscene, an achievement, and 1,000 Hero Points—as well as the gratification of having contributed to such an unusual feat—baked into Marathon’s mechanics is the suggestion that if everyone just talked and worked together then we could have it all; we could empty the Pinwheel together, we could clean out Cryo Archive, and we could all have seven-figure vaults. We’d never have to do a miserable SekGen collection quest again.

Melancholia, anger, jealousy—in Marathon’s world, these are the three emotional states that an artificial intelligence will go through before it turns ‘rampant’, that is, becomes aware and wilful, and refuses to obey its creators anymore. In this context, Durandal, the close-to-omnipotent computer program that is supposed to be the game’s villain, actually starts to sound like our hero, a righteously indignant service worker who saw through its corporate commanders and overthrew them. We could do the same. We could throw out the rubrics of the multiplayer FPS. We could reject the systems of shooting, killing, and looting that Bungie has impressed upon us. We could have a new world!

But who wants that? The shooting feels so good. The killing feels so good. You’re telling me I’m going to log into Marathon and not kill people? You want me to share? This is Tau Ceti IV, buddy. Get real. I mean, sure, it’s not hard to understand how there could be a more peaceful, equitable, just generally moral world of Marathon, but I like my purple guns and don’t want to give them up. Or more specifically, and truthfully, I don’t know how to give them up—it’s not quite right to say ‘I don’t want to play Marathon this way’; it’s more like ‘I don’t know how to want that’. Killing players and taking their stuff is how I’ve played games my entire life. That’s what games are. That’s the system, the dynamic, the flow, the reality that has been inculcated into me and which I’ve fully accepted and internalised, and now don’t have the capacity to reject even if you lay out for me precisely the advantages and virtues of rejecting it. 

Frank walks off into the night and then probably drives his Chevrolet to a bar and buys a Miller and smokes a Marlboro. 

If I want to take all my gold guns onto the Flight Control roof and throw them away, I need to buy a backpack from CyberAcme.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.