Misconceptions

[VikingBoyBilly]

This is what I used to think:

- Marathon 1 had no music.
- Leela and Durandal were humans talking to you through futuristic emails.
- Durandal was a mad scientist who kidnaps you to play his games because.... it's what mad scientists do!
- The S'pht naturally evolved into robots. I didn't fully understand the concept of "cyborg" and the references that there were little brain-looking things inside of the exoskeletons went over my head.

What did you used to think?

[Zott]

Since I played it when I was a little kid:

-Everybody was Pfhor; Pfhor, S'pht, robots, etc.
-Except civilians, they were freaky, but human.
-Pfhor was pronounced Pro-file. I suppose because of 'compiler'.
-There was was no run button.
-Terminals have text in them, but click through them as fast as possible. Revisit same terminal multiple times to see if level beaten.
-

[Crater Creator]

My immediate (mis)understanding of things on my first playthroughs years ago:

• Marathon 1 had no music.
• The invincibility powerup didn't do anything beyond making you all static-colored.
• Holding down control to run all the time was a bad habit, because then everyone would start doing it and everyone's fingers would get tired.
• The ten cyborgs on the Marathon, the Battleroids, and the player represent three similar but unrelated entities. The first two are cool side stories that don't tie in to the player's history or actions.
• The word spurious in "spurious interrupt" means unexpected, not fake.
• The compilers are a type of Pfhor.
• The Marathon was attacked by multiple spaceships: a scout ship, a big assault ship that did the most damage, a slave ship, and possibly more. The ship in the manual is the big assault ship.
• The writer in the secret terminal on Defend This! isn't Tycho, it's a human typing out his last words before he runs out of air (I confused assimilated and asphyxiated).
• The big guys in the purple tunics are something other than the Hulks mentioned in the terminals.
• The Marathon is a spaceship made of metal & other manmade materials, not a converted moon.
• The Marathon is and always was in our solar system, somewhere around Mars.
• When you hit the relay switches in G4 Sunbathing, the satellite dish moves (I swear I saw it once! ).
• Grenade climbing, and using the flamethrower as a jetpack on Pfhor levels, are impossible.
• There's no little critter inside a S'pht 'Kr's flying exosuit. What you see is the body of the alien itself.
• Charon Doesn't Make Change is a time-based mission and if you take too long, the water will be over your head throughout the entire level and you'll drown.
• If you're not careful when jumping down the hole in What About Bob?, the marine will die.
• Down in the geothermal station, the spot with the mechanical texture at the end of the gangways is the circuitry, not the access panel to the circuitry. It takes lots of grenades to destroy it.
• All Pfhor drones in Marathon 2 are hostile. Ignore the different colors; Durandal is talking about something else.
• All the S'pht terminals on The Hard Stuff Rules are talking about current events, not ancient history.
• In Feel the Noise, we learn Durandal is the literal reincarnation of Roland's sword.
• The levels of Marathon Infinity take place in sequential temporal order, some time after Marathon 2.
• The dream levels in Marathon Infinity take place on the same plane of consciousness as any other level. You just go to some weird places on alien worlds, and the terminals there are loaded up with some random story.
• In Rise Robot Rise, the image of a Pfhor fighter's head plugged into some machinery is actually you. You've been given a breath mask so you can breathe on the Pfhor ship, and the other fighters don't attack you because you look like a Phfor. In fact, this might be an alternate universe where the player was always a Pfhor.
• Potato anuses and Grendels are enemies like any other and need to be killed.
• Son of Grendel and Bagged Again are different places. There's no resemblance, and if there is, it's coincidence.

[Destiny]

-Pfhor was pronounced "Per-fer."
-Durandal was pronounced "Dur-run-dul."
-Jjaro was pronounced "ji-jaro."
-I thought the exact same thing as Crater Creator, believing you turned into a Pfhor fighter in Infinity.
-The security officer was human and not a cyborg.
-Tycho was the enemy right from the start.
-Bob was a lot of clones of one person.

There's no story mixup really because I never read the terminals the first few times I played the game. Surprisingly, I was pronouncing S'pht and Tycho right the whole time.

[SylithSenjak]

That the floating pink bugs in M2 were the F'lickta (I don't remember what I thought the actual F'lickta were).

[irons]

• Marathon is a game
• Minotaur.

[goran]

Misconceptions:

Marathon 1:
Blue fighters have machine guns
There are a total of 40 different weapons in marathon
There are a total of 40 solo levels
It is possible to befriend green fighters
There is no run key
There is a secret way to progress in Blaspheme Quarantine
Vidmaster videos are programmed. No one can be that good.

Marathon 2:
Who the hell is Durandal?
There are enforcers on Lhowon Water Park.

Marathon Infinity:
The point of marathon infinity is the map editor.
Reading a manual 1000 times makes you understand it better.
There is a lot of new weapons.
Blood times of Lhowon is about a war on Lhowon between humans and pfhor.( sadly the story was fucking time travel, BIG dissapointment!)

[VikingBoyBilly]

- Speaking of disappointment, the mutant cyborg s'pht controlling pfhor was going to be the final boss.

- the Marathon is a spaceship, and the pfhor ship is bigger than the marathon (almost 2 kilometers!!!)

- Bernard Strauss and the guy who smuggled battleroids onto the Marathon are two different people.

- The s'pht that attack you on L'howon were there before you arrived, not the s'pht from your own ship being forcibly controlled (not sure if battle group three had their own s'pht, but I'm pretty sure all the reference material says Durandal's s'pht are the first ones to arrive on L'howon for a thousand years)

[Cephalostrum]

Misconceptions:
There are enforcers on Lhowon Water Park.

Thanks M2 Windows promos.

[Shocktart]

In Marathon 2 I thought the Spht'kr were the bad guys when I first saw them.
I hit one and it turned on me, so I never made the correct connection.

[keen]

>I thought that the marathon had just arrived at tau ceti not but a few days before the game began
>I thought the marathon was a wholly synthetic vessel
>I thought the game had conditionally-branching levels for those missions where you have "success" and "fail" terms
>I thought the flechette weapon was just bungie being funny with their gun terminology and that it was really some sort of weird microwave emitter due to the huge front sight
>I thought the pfhor had a terrible infantry and were simply using stolen tech because they were actually a low-tech race; their ship was simply a repurposed jjaro craft -- the machine-gun troopers were using stolen MA-75s.
>after catching on that the above was not the case, I assumed the pfhor on the marathon were carrying shock staffs specifically because they knew they were trying to capture live slaves -- then I played M2 and saw them using the same weapons in a general military campaign.
>I thought that the MA-75 was a mini-gun type weapon.
>I thought the shotgun was simply a double-barreled lever-action, not a "magical durandal too-complex-for-you" action.
>I thought that the missile launcher was captured alien tech because of how odd it's ergonomics were.
>I thought that the other cyborgs had been on the ship and had each one fallen during operations against the pfhor.
>I thought that couch fishing was a mission about shutting down certain subroutines of durandal, not manually reactivating the MADDs
>I thought that there would be missions where you would have to shut durandal out of certain ship subsystems in order to unlock different types of doors (a la metroid fusion's security rooms) based on how the marathon doors manual described tiered door systems
>I thought terminals had branching conversation trees
>I thought that the entry and exit terminals could both be used to exit the level OR receive mission briefings depending on what conditions you've currently met.
>I thought that the weird begining section of older versions of m1a1 was the security officer crawling through service tunnels leading from the marathon's surface into it's interior. Because of this, I thought that the mirata's escape pod had simply anchored to the marathon's surface and that the craft in the hangar was some sort of vessel designed for everyday operations on the marathon.
>on my first play through, I thought that the destination for the level was the hangar bay itself.
>I thought the steel barrels on the marathon would explode if I shot them, so I made efforts to not do so.
>I thought that the designation of the pfhor ship as a "corvette" meant that it had a shape similar to the 20th century automobile, and that the term was simply used to give a description to an otherwise unknown vessel.
>I thought that a lot of the trash terms and terms with stories/earth history on them were the AIs/s'pht sending tactical data in a cryptic manner that wouldn't be understood by the other party on account of culture shock (especially the terminal detailing that roman battle -- I thought that was an AI plotting the defense of the marathon)
>I thought that durandal snatched you away not simply because he was insane, but because he "knew" leela had been compromised by the pfhor and would inevitably start giving you counter productive objectives.
>I used to think that the little scraps of paper seen on the floor as clutter could be picked up and read like terminals and that I couldn't do it simply because I was stupid and didn't have my keymap correct.

[Johnman]

- The way to simulate terminals changing their messages/behavior is by having two very thin platforms, one in front of the other, and having one or the other raised depending on the terminal script you want to show to the player.
- If you run away from a teleporting terminal fast enough you can avoid being teleported.
- Barrels in Marathon are explosive, but they can take some damage before doing so.
- There's no music in Marathon.
- Marathon Infinity makes sense, my problem is a very limited English vocabulary (not my native language).
- The f'lickta are the blobs with wings.
- The pfhor ship outside in the first level of Infinity is the ship we came in.
- Marathon Infinity is a remake of the original Marathon.
- The assault rifle is some kind of minigun.
- All the alien races names are interchangeable, more like different cultures.

EDIT:
- Evil is Marathon 4. The assault rifle sprite is finally accurate.
- Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge is canon.
- Marathon V is in the making.

[Xap]

It is possible to befriend green fighters

I lol'd hard at this one.

There are enforcers on Lhowon Water Park.

Also thought this, and compilers for some reason. I think the box set showed incorrect screenshots?

[Ares Ex Machina]

Yep. It's hard to convey what it's like to play an entire game within a few screenshots, so I'm not surprised they decided to cram more than what was actually there into a single screenshot.

[Crater Creator]

That reminds me of the screenshot of Aye Mak Sicur's sewers, with the hunters and the vacbobs and the drones and the cool lighting.

It looked so awesome, I think it was this screenshot in particular that convinced me to buy the game.

[Spurious Interrupt]

I played the majority of the Marathon series for the first time as an adult, so I don't have many fun childhood misconceptions. That said, I did play M2 on XBLA as a teenager, and I played the horde mode before the campaign. Since the S'pht kr are always aggressive in that mode, I never thought not to shoot them in the campaign, thus when I got to those levels as an adult they were way easier than I remembered.