Marathon (2026) is an "extraction" shooter. You spawn into a map filled with robots and other players. You kill stuff (sometimes other players), loot stuff (sometimes other players). Maybe do some missions. Then you try to "exfiltrate". If you succeed, you get to keep all the stuff you found and bring some of it with you back into the next match. If you are killed (probably by another player), well, then you don't get to keep any of your stuff, including any stuff you brought with you. Some of the stuff is better than other stuff, so you'd rather not lose that stuff, but also the better stuff makes it easier to get even better stuff than that.

It's a pretty good game.

= Sweaty
I'm having enough fun with the game that I do something I don't really do anymore which is to start engaging with the community. Well, "engage" as in: reading forum threads, the subreddit, joining a Discord, etc. 

This is where I encounter the term "sweaty" to describe other players. I can immediately intuit what this means, I think. I imagine players who are extremely competitive and probably stressed out about it, rude to their teammates, getting too mad when they lose, etc. The kind of people that are why I don't play DOTA because I don't want to have to mute half the people I play with.

I quickly come to understand I have this wrong. The "sweats" are your opponents that keep killing you. Why are they "sweaty"? Well, just look at them: they had better gear than you, a huge advantage. You would have been able to kill them, but you had no chance because their shields, they were purple. Their guns, they were purple. Obviously they play this game way more than you, they try way harder than you. That's so lame. You are way too cool for that.    

"Why the fuck are people still loading into regular queue with free kits? The free kit queue is available now. They need to do something about this shit. I'm tired of being matched with free kits against 3 stacks of purple and gold shields."

"I'm so fucking tired of it"

Levels

I do a lot of curling in the winter.

It's often described as "chess on ice" but I think of it more like "X-COM on ice" because any given move you attempt to make actually comes with only a percentage chance for success. Successfully delivering a stone is kind of like successfully hitting a golf shot; there are a million moving parts that you can screw up, but even amateurs can more or less do it well enough to keep things interesting. The difference between the guys on TV and me is basically that they have more skill points than I do; where my success chance is 60%, their chance is 99%. When they try something with a success chance of 60%, I might not even notice that the shot was an option to begin with.

Despite this gulf, I also believe the sport remains an interesting strategic game at all levels. What counts as a good strategy for beginners, however, is not going to be a good strategy as you play against stronger teams. I coach new curlers on the regular, and sometimes you come across one who has watched a lot on TV before they've ever stepped on the ice. Those are the ones for whom you need to break their preconceptions, sometimes. You can't call the game the way they do on TV, because the players on TV have more cards in their deck then you do.

What's nice is that most non-recreational curling leagues have a ladder system; call it a ranked mode. You win enough games one round, you move up for the next. Sometimes, you end up in a round where you are the bottom feeder. To win, you probably need to be a bit of a chaos agent, and hope you catch some breaks. If you lose, hopefully you learn something. And over the years I've gotten better and better, and spend less time as the bottom feeder.

= Factions 

I'm still not sure what the story is really all about in *Marathon (2026)*. It's pretty cryptically told.

The players are all "runners" attempting to salvage information and material over the catastrophically failed colony on Tau Ceti IV. You are doing this on behalf of one of various corporations that have varying degrees of plausible arguments as to why they have any right to be doing this. 

You aren't actually physically going to the planet to do this, of course. That would be a 100 year trip. Instead, you've uploaded your consciousness to the future sci-fi cloud, and that consciousness is driving these shells that are printed "on demand". Uploading your brain wasn't cheap, however, so you owe these corporations some good old fashioned indentured servitude, hence the "running". *Hardspace: Shipbreaker*, but with guns.  

Opposing you are the UESC, which would be your typical corrupt fascist space-authoritarian empire running things back on Earth, who have populated the failed colony with their robot cops. At least, that's how things are framed by your bosses, the forementioned anarcho-capitalist syndicates of questionable motives. One might also look at this situation and see a government attempting to investigate a hugely catastrophic humanitarian disaster that is actively being scavenged by lawless private companies.

Of course, it's not even clear to me whether there are even any humans involved anymore. You only ever interact with AI, robots, other shells, data logs and voice recordings. One faction has a cult-like devotion to shells just "killing" and "dying" over and over again to achieve transcendence. Is this whole thing just LLMs hallucinating their own fan fiction in the remains of a long-extinct human race? 

In *Marathon (1994)*, "MIDA" was coded as a classic people's revolution gone wrong. In *Marathon (2026)*, "MIDA" feels so on the nose that I'm convinced that a later season twist will be that they are a UESC psy-op.

"This game is also hardcore in that you CANNOT second screen this game on solos if you expect to extract. You have to constantly be vigilant or you're going to die. You have to have sound up. You cannot listen to loud music or listen to dialogue heavy show. Arc if you do that in a pvp lobby you'll die too--but a lot of casual people (like me) would play with sound 20-30%, go into a few runs to loot while watching game of thrones. This game I literally am single screening as soon as the lobby starts to load up."

Perception

It's 1997, I'm playing Quake deathmatch online on map DM3. I've got a pretty good respawn loop going. I forget all the timings, but basically to do well at Quake deathmatch you want to time the respawn of the key weapons and items. Pick up the rocket launcher, run over to the armor, run back to the rocket launcher it time for it to respawn, go get the Quad Damage, go back to the rocket launcher, etc. Kill people along the way.

I pick up the rocket launcher, and nearby some poor sucker respawns and I immediately kill him. Later, at the armor, I see them again and kill them again. I pick up the quad damage and go back to the rocket launcher, and I see him spawn in yet again and well, kaboom. It's the way the game is played, after all.

"Fucking spawn camper," I see in the chat, before they disconnect.

= Progress 

One thing I would criticize about the game is that the progress is pretty glacial for someone like me. If I'm playing a game more than 10 hours a week then that's what I would call obsessively playing it, but this amount is not really getting me very deep into the game. There are apparently going to be progress wipes at fairly regular intervals, and I'm not going to be anywhere near the ceiling when they happen.

There's sort of three tracks I think about in terms of progress.

The first is the loot you extract with. Green guns, blue shields, purple horseshoes, etc. This is the boring one, to me, but is the one that people freak out about the most because it's the stuff you can lose. 

The second is the faction rep, which unlock various talent/skill type features. This is the more permanent progress system by which you can become more powerful in ways that cannot be lost (at least until the season wipe). This stuff is a grind; faction XP is a slow drip, and you also need to spend "salvage" materials to unlock the various skills, and as you level up that salvage becomes rarer and rarer. They key to finding the rarer salvage is to go into the various high-risk events/locked rooms/etc. where you are more likely to be fighting other (highly skilled and well equipped) players.

The third is what I'm most interested in, and that's codex entries and story beats. You get some of this through completing the various faction missions, which vary in difficulty. You get others through achievement type activities, and some you get by finding rare items out in the world and successfully extracting them. I'll be pretty bummed out if this sort of stuff becomes missable due to server wipes in the future; if anything sours me on the game it will be that.

"Oh boy... are those squads that are camping in Hauler for like the whole match till the last exfil, having any fun?"

"Like, how is it fun for them? Really shitty way to play the game, camp in one part of the map for the whole round, while there are whole 3 maps and many parts of them all."

"I know that some people are bad at the game, but it's been like two months, cmon..."

Homework

Sometimes I play something as "homework".

When it launched, I played a bit of Street Fighter VI. I'd never been a fighting game guy. I could probably do the quarter-circle-forward thing successfully one time out of three. I remember renting Street Fighter II for SNES and I could barely even get to the end of arcade mode on the lowest difficulty, and even then they wouldn't let you see the little end-game cut scene unless you turned the difficulty up. Whenever I played fighting games against actual human beings, I felt like I just sat there doing nothing while the other player pulled off some billion hit combo on me. I wrote the whole genre off.

I remember a Discord thread with some pals where we were debating whether or not fighting games were "accessible", whatever that means. I was originally on the side that fighting games were difficult, demoralizing, frustrating, and not at all easy to get into. I was somewhat persuaded by a line of argument that this is exagerrated; the game is literally just moving back and forth and pushing a punch or kick button - what could be more accessible than that? You don't have to actually be good at the game. So I did some homework.

= Exploring

I'm doing a solo run, as a change of pace. I'm on *Dire Marsh*, the swampy algae farms that now have a mysterious "Anomaly" scarring the middle of the area. I spawn near a zone called "Quarantine". I've read some codex entries alluding to certain contagions on this planet, though I'm not sure what that would have to do with Durandal and rampant AIs and the Pfhor or however it's spelled.

Just outside of the inflatable structure that made up the quarantined area, I see a set of monuments. It almost looks like a tiny graveyard, with some weird religious symbol in place of the more familiar weird religious symbols we see on gravestones in real life. But they are packed way too close together to mark graves with bodies in them. Maybe they are effigies? There's some cryptic writing on the wall. I move closer to take a look.

Another player shoots me in the back of the head. Knifes my downed body. Takes my stuff. Run complete.

"I look up just in time to see a purple sweaty this late trying to exit Pinwheel down the ladder, why they didn't go out one of the vents in Command, I don't know. I delete them with my bully and makeout with their Purple Backpack and Purple Bully. Not bad."

Goals

I play guitar, poorly. Well, that's just my self-deprecation talking. I do think I have my strengths as a player, in my own way. But I could be a lot better. But I don't really try that hard to really get better. I don't want to make a living at it. (Well, I mean, that would be cool and all but, c'mon now.)

In recent years I've finally found myself in a crappy cover band, occasionally playing at a bar in front of strangers. This was on my bucket list for a while. I make a lot of mistakes. Now, all musicians make mistakes, especially random bar bands. Most people listening don't notice, I try to remind myself. I usually notice though. And the mistakes I make are usually way bigger mistakes than I hear others make. It's alright though. If it really bothered me, I could either quit playing, or actually dedicate serious time and effort to get better. I'm happy where I am.

= Exfil

Another solo run, this time on *Perimeter*. This is early on in my experience with the game before I'd worked up the nerve to queue with other human beings. I'd started with the impression that the game would be semi-collaborative. I would use proximity chat to call out to other players I saw. I quickly learned that nobody trusts you, and the time-to-kill is too short for negotiations; better to shoot first and loot later.

I've actually had a pretty good run this time around. I completed a mission, have some good gear, have a couple of valuable bits of scrap. I plan to exfiltrate. The exfil points spawn periodically and are marked on the map, but it's getting late on the timer. I think there are only one or two left. I really don't want to lose the stuff I've managed to get.

I creep up on the exfil point from a rocky cliff overlooking it. I've been killed a few times trying to exfil. Not this time, I tell myself. I scope it out for a while, I don't see anybody. But it's near this sort of structure that I can't really see into. I'm worried there's someone inside, so I run around and enter it from behind. I find nobody, and I'm running out of time. 

I look out of a window onto the exfil point and see another player running up to it. They activate it. I shoot to kill. They're down, I run up to finish them off. I hear through the proximity chat, "Fuckin' cheap ass camper motherfucker, you suck."

"Whatever changed with the matchmaking has worked out wonderfully for our squad. We're encountering very few unbeatable sweaty killer demon trios in our lobbies, all our fights feel really balanced. We're all level 100ish."

Learning

According to Steam, I have 26.1 hours of time in Street Fighter VI. This was probably 5% single player (a weirdly bananas Yakuza style open world thing?), 20% training mode feeling bad about not being able to do the combo tasks, and 75% ranked fights.

I learned to love a ranked mode in Rocket League. You would think that the unranked mode would be more relaxing or casual, but instead I found it to be too punishing. When you are bad at something, most of the players you get matched with are way out of your (ahem) league. But in ranked mode, if you suck, then your rank is low. So you get matched against other people who also suck. Perfect!

This also worked pretty good for SF6. After my 26.1 hours, I think I maybe cracked into Silver with my main character (Jaime). Or maybe just Bronze, I can't remember. I do remember being a little annoyed that the ranks were sort of a one-way, ratchet type thing: once you got up into Silver, you could never fall back to Bronze even if you lost a million matches in a row (which I did). That quirk aside, though, I actually had a pretty good time playing what I am certain were some pretty fucking embarassing SF6 matches against people just as bad as me.

I still have one vivid memory. It was funny, I was always just playing one match against someone, and after the match I would just quit and go back into the matchmaking. I'm not sure how long I was doing this before I learned (from my Discord pals) that this is actually super fucking rude. Anyway, it was after I started playing out the "best of three" format where I got it.

I had a match, my Jaime vs. I think it was a Ken. In the first match, the Ken kept jumping in on me, and the one thing I'd actually been doing pretty good at was anticipating this and uppercutting them out of the air. I took the first match easily. In the rematch, they jumped in one more time, and I uppercutted one more time. And then I could immediately see them decide this wasn't working. They switched to running up in my face and they just overwhelmed me with various punches and kicks and I just couldn't cope. They won that match easily. And in the rematch, they took another round the same way, until finally I found a window where I realized I could block and then counter with my little low sweep dealie. Or I could jump in on them and they never managed to counter it. I came back to win the last two rounds and so the won the match and then so won the set. GGs.

This was where I internalized the value of the best-of-three set. A single match was too small a sample, a random encounter passing by in the night. Playing out the best of three allowed us to learn and adapt to one another in a little miniature chess match playing over top of our flailing fat fingers incapable of consistently executing our super moves.

= Run

My buddy and I are queued into *Dire Marsh* as a duo, which means we are short one player compared to everyone around us. We're trying to complete some missions, which we do successfully. We have a bit of loot to our name. We decide to head for an exfil, one that will spawn a wave of NPCs when we activate it. Just before we get there, I see movement: another team across the swampy clearing.

Shots are traded back and forth. I'm pinned down in nearby hanger, my buddy off to the side in the marsh. We lose track of the other team -- did they run? We gamble: my buddy goes in to trigger the exfil and spawn the wave of NPCs. We hope the distraction will expose the other team, or we can exfil in the chaos.

It doesn't work. Another team seems to join the fray, and between them and the NPCs, my buddy goes down just outside of the exfil. I hide in my hanger. The exfil goes off, and we aren't on it. I go into rat mode, hiding and watching my buddy's corpse, looking for those other teams. A lone higher tier NPC patrols back and forth near the aftermath. I wait patiently, probably for 5 or 10 minutes. I haven't seen the other team, and nobody has come to loot my teammate's stuff. He is silent throughout all this, so as to void distracting me.

I finally make my move; I kill the remaining NPC and resurrect my friend (who is only now learning the fact that there is no time limit to when you can be resurrected). We book it to another exfil location.

When we get there, I see two players just about to exfil. I'm almost out of ammo and healing items, but they spot my partner and start shooting. They don't see me; I down one of them. I'm trying to finish them from a distance, but they went behind the cover of a large truck. I shoot some more -- did I down the other one? I can't quite tell, and I haven't yet learned that you can watch the combat log to find out this sort of thing. 

I charge up to land a finisher on the one I do see. There is no other. Also: where is the third? I have no bullets left, but they can only be in one place which is the other side of this truck. I pull out my knife and run around the corner, and am immediately killed. Where did that come from? Oh, they were hiding *underneath* the truck. They come out to finish me off.

That's when my buddy, who was still alive for all of this, bails me out. Kills them, finishes them, resurrects me. We trigger the exfil, escape, and then breathe for the first time in the last twenty minutes. Never did see the third player, if they existed.

"Death in this game means my build is gone, the loot I worked for is gone, my quest progress is stalled, etc. YOU might not care about dying because you have 200 hours in this game and are fully indoctrinated, but most of the gaming audience won't be you, which is clearly evident by the number of players who uninstall after dying in 500 milliseconds by a player they couldn't even register."

Competition

I'm not a parent, but I have very firm beliefs in the value of having your children play in some sort of sport or competitive activity that involves being in person. I think competition with others can be a healthy path toward self-improvement. I think supervised competition during your youth will help you become gracious in victory and also gracious in defeat, and these are very useful life skills to have.

Video games, these days, with their single player campaigns and their difficulty levels, teach you to expect to win. Game over is failure. Progress lost is time wasted.

Video games also teach you that other people are NPCs. They aren't people, they are shells.

= Marathon 

I'm still not sure what the story is really all about in *Marathon (2026)*. It might be a genius work of satire. Or it might be a sublime reflection on the nature of consciousness and the human soul. Heck, it's *barely even there*; this is a game mainly about shooting other people so you can take their stuff only to lose it to some other person that shot you. 

It's a series of disparate threads. Fragments of stories, collected in some non-deterministic order for any given player. Some of the threads seem to be related, but maybe not. Maybe they are just random thoughts that went through the writers heads and they thought it sounded cool so they put it in. Maybe it's going somewhere, or maybe it isn't. 

I suppose I could read some spoiler threads that would explain everything, but it's been kind of fun trying to piece together some sort of narrative thread on my own. I'll never actually make enough progress to see any kind of conclusion. Much like most of what I have done in my life and will probably do in my life, it will probably never be complete, or at least not as complete as I imagined it would be when I started.

But I'm enjoying my time with it. I try to get a little bit better at it every day. Eventually, I'll stop. I'll die and lose all my stuff. But I'm happy where I am.

Four Stars.

---

Marathon (2026) is the:

• Greatest Video Game of all time.
• 2nd greatest Thing of all time.