Every time I think about Marathon nowadays, I think about two quotes. The first, I heard at Bungie when I visited earlier this year for a Marathon hands-on preview event. We were told that half of the game's systems had been thrown out or overhauled during development – not entirely unusual, as games may change dramatically from their initial pitch – with whispers among veteran testers alluding to a radically different game than what we were about to see. I asked about these overhauls in a group Q&A later during the visit, and we heard a bit of how Marathon looked before the hero shooter-coded Runners of today, back when there was limb damage and a more persistent world.
The second quote is one I heard from Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr.. As part of our big developer roundtable on what people get wrong about games, he said he increasingly finds games made in two years to be more exciting than games made in eight years, because "six years of that was people wandering in a no man's land while some guy would come in and radically change the game because he played something really cool."
