If you consider yourself a fan of Halo and love some digital archaeology, boy, do I have some treats for you. As you may or may not know, the original Halo went through several conceptual iterations before it became the first-person shooter that’d take the world by storm as an Xbox exclusive. Hell, it was damn near a Mac exclusive. Also, as many have speculated based on artistic similarities, recurring iconography, and shared narrative themes of deep space colonization and murderous AIs going rogue, Halo often felt like it was destined to join up in-universe with Marathon—Bungie’s pre-Halo, once Mac-exclusive shooter.
Though I recall seeing some of these images Back in the Day™, several of them featuring the original Master Chief design (probably before he was even known as such) showed up on my radar by way of Reddit user Ki-ev-an’s post on r/halo. Even though they kinda look like conceptual art for game production, these are actually fan works posted to halo.bungie.org, or “HBO,” which fashioned itself as “the fan’s fansite”—you know, back when we used to seek to own and curate our digital community spaces as much as possible.
There’s an undeniable, old-school CGI charm to these images. My favorite, and perhaps the clearest fusion of Marathon and Halo universes, has to be the half-sunken ship bearing the name U.E.S.C. Cortana, combining Marathon’s organization name with Halo’s know-it-all digital gal.
Fans, of course, weren’t the only ones digitally kitbashing Halo and Marathon iconography. The Bungie Halo games are chock full o’ Marathon references, from the franchise’s logo right on 343 Guilty Spark’s “face,” to the very name of Halo’s legendary rocket launcher, “SPNKR,” which got its name from Marathon’s “SPNKER X018 SSM Launcher.” The theme of AIs going rogue via “Rampancy” was also explored first in Marathon’s fiction. And though 343 Industries (now known as Halo Studios) would take creative liberties with the secret ending of Halo 3 to establish its own fiction, the planet we see Master Chief float towards was thought to establish a connection between the two sister franchises. This obviously was not the case, but the fact that fans were theorycrafting their way to figuring out how to connect Marathon and Halo at all speaks to just how much it was on so many people’s minds at the time.
Hope you enjoyed this little trip down ancient memory lane as much as I did!
.