Bit Bucket

Ten years ago, I was bored at my shitty job working a shitty front desk. Then, I was a daily reader of the Marathon’s Story site, which wasn’t so much a blog, as it was a font of knowledge about a deeply engaging videogame called Marathon. It was an FPS, yes, and you could play the whole game without so much as a hint of it. But it was there if you looked for it. The story was everywhere.

I loved it.

At the time, Halo was in pre-development, and a series of emails were sent to Hamish Sinclair who ran the Story site, some intentionally forged, some not, and they created a fantastically interesting story arc. These letters set the seed for what I’d discover on 4/18/01, but began ten years ago today.

It began simply. There was a blip on the Story page that was similar to the Cortana letters, and gosh isn’t this interesting, and that’s what lead me first to the Yahoo Group, and then on to the IRC Channel. More stunning still was that the domains were registered to “Doug Zartman” at Microsoft. Zartman was an employee of Bungie who made the move from their Chicago home westward to Seattle when Microsoft bought Bungie in the late 1990s. His famous “They’re Everywhere!” is one of my favorite little genius pieces of the Marathon series.

Anyhow, could this be? Could it all be related, I wondered? The depth of the Marathon story told through a new medium? As I pored through the initial phone calls, and then the dozens of websites and puzzles that followed, the story had hooked me.  No, it had nothing to do with aliens (or did it?) or the Marathon universe, but the plot was a rich mélange of science fiction memes, from androids to house intelligences to climate technologies, and it crossed all of my core competencies.

I remember, toward the end of the event, picking up my office phone and dialing a number I figured would be another recording. Instead, it was a live person. I panicked I hung up. I called back. We’d gotten recorded calls before, we’d gotten voicemail (and hacked it) before, but we’d never had a person at the other end. It was Mike Royal, a security guard at the Statue of Liberty. We had to convince him to do something for us, to look for someone in the statue.

It took hours, but we convinced the character at the other end of the line to be brave, and go see it. It was amazing. It was electric. We’d done it, the lot of us, we’d advanced the plot further.

We worked every puzzle, every piece of lute tablature, every baseball code, every clay model.  Along the way, we made friends. Amber in Toronto. Andrea, Andrew, Bronwen, Jay, Karen and Will in New York City. Dan and Adrian in England. Lou in Rhode Island. J.B. in Los Angeles, Celina in San Diego. Irwin in Seattle. Robin in DC.  There we all were. 

Robin and Dan are married, and after living in London, they now live in Portland, Oregon. We went to Irwin’s wedding last summer.  Andrea, pregnant with her first during the waning phases of the game, has two lovely daughters.  Jay and Bronwen are living together in Los Angeles.  Andrew is a practicing attorney, and Will is a practicing doctor with an MD/PhD. J.B. works for O’Reilly media in Sebastopol.  Amber and Karen both work for IBM.

Adrian, Dan, Jay and Andrea have worked in the field that this game invented, going on to do marvelous things, as have others who I haven’t named here including Krystyn Wells, Brooke Thompson, Steve Peters, and too many others.

We’re in different places now, all of us, but we’re still in touch. We’re just a small part of the 7,000 people who’d joined that Yahoo Group, and the few hundred who took part in the live updates in IRC on Tuesdays and Fridays during the game.

If you want to read more, read Jay’s remembrance, or Andrea’s post today.

But mostly, thank you Elan Lee, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman. You made one helluva adventure.