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Somewhere In The Heavens It Existed...
Years ago, I’d make a monthly drive through the Appalachian mountains to visit a city hidden in its hills. It housed the only man I’d trust with my life to cut my hair; we had built a relationship over time, and my loyalty to a good barber is almost detrimental to a fault.
Tragically, this drive would be my last as I’d soon discover my barber had recently developed a serious relationship with the penitentiary system, leaving me stranded in the middle of the ‘Land of the Blue Mist’, too close to my destination and too far from home. As I began my return, I stumbled across a casino, one so out of place and ragged it felt unworldly. Its floor littered with souls entranced by neon lights and Diet Coke-rum mixtures, they sat, smashing buttons, losing again and again, in a private oasis of pain and pleasure.
Wandering the space, I started to think no one other than me and these individuals knew of this place’s existence. An obscure sanctuary hidden in solitude made for these people and these people alone, I was trespassing where I was not welcome, a damn world amongst itself. Regardless, I used the bathroom, bought a t-shirt as proof, and walked back out the doors, laughing the whole way home about how crazy that a space with an aesthetic so alien could entrap people into giving away their time for just one more dopamine spark.
I never encountered that feeling again until last month, when I opened up Steam and witnessed that my playtime of over 100 hours had been logged for Bungie’s newest extraction shooter, Marathon.
I’ve been sitting out of the Marathon discourse for quite a while now, but I cannot hold off any longer. I LOVE MARATHON.
I love how mean it is to me. I love that it makes me (A single-player story enjoyer) crawl through the mud for a little bit more of its coveted lore. I revel at the idea of dying to a mistake of my own hands only to have another person on mic stand over me and tell me how fucking stupid I was to chase them into a trap, and if I had just waited then maybe I could have been the star of this struggle, but alas I am just another dumb lizard brained baboon that craved the neuron synapse of violence, before a knife plunges deep into my chest and catapults me back to the main menu.
Alternatively, there are moments when Marathon’s user interface congeals into my cerebral, its neon glow pressuring my fine motor skills to outdistance every player in the lobby. Bit-crushed screams rupture from 9 to 6 fathers and streamer try-hards as they question how a perfectly planned, electrically charged burst erupted from the fog to crack their shell? The only answer I can give them is: “This shit get wicked out here playboi,” as they bleed out in my hands. I collect their valuables, split ‘em up with the homies, and shit-talk until the next match, where you guessed it, I lose it all again, because my lizard baboon brain craved the neuron synapse of violence just one more time. The ethos of Marathon is clear in every bleed-out: “You finna take this loss and learn from it.”
Ain’t Dangerous Enough To Hang With Us
Extraction shooters and suffering go hand-in-hand; everything I described above is colored by the numbers for the genre, a roulette wheel of pain with virtual firearms as betting chips. While Marathon’s art style is breathtaking, its gameplay isn’t revolutionary. There are some cool RPG class-building options on top of the gambling. But, at its core, I’m still seeking the same dopamine I could get in various other run-based gambling simulators, i.e., ‘Clover Pit’, so why do I now have 135 HOURS in playtime? Why do I log on every day to get stomped into oblivion? Then it hit me. Marathon isn’t the problem. Marathon is THE solution.
Just like that ragged casino tucked into the Appalachian hills, a private oasis built for a specific kind of person in a specific kind of pain, Marathon is my mountain casino. Except I paid forty dollars to buy a permanent seat at the ‘All You Can Gamble Buffet,’ and I never have to leave. I get everything the casino experience promises: the dopamine, the pleasure, the agony, the random stabbing on the game floor, the cheating scandals, the alien-like neon glow pulling me deeper as the hours dissolve into nothing, and at the end of the night, I get to keep my rent money. “Can’t End On a Loss” became the motto as I poured hour after hour into the machine, hoping that this time skill and luck would interweave in a beautiful dance long enough to have some player slip into the sights of my volt rifle. That feeling felt like nothing else in the world, meanwhile people are out here feeding real dollars into slot machines in THIS ECONOMY, and not getting cool alien guns out of it, couldn’t be me. Despite all the jokes, I couldn’t help but wonder how long my little oasis could exist?
It’s A Homey Kind Of Hostility
The bozo bean counters tell me Marathon’s player numbers are shrinking, the mouth-breather streamers shriek about the 250 million Bungie spent to make the damn game, and Mil-sim sickos say it’s dead on arrival every moment the servers refresh. They got the numbers, but they ain’t factoring in what Marathon is excelling at in the extraction genre. The gunplay, the detailed class building, the gun customization, the evolving sci-fi world-building coursing out of it’s codex like a slot machine paying out in lore and undeniable fun. Marathon took a swing so different from everything around it that the people who usually run these lobbies peeked in, realized they had to spend time adjusting to a new game, and then walked away. Which meant the people who stayed were exactly my kind of people.
But Marathon made me realize I had experienced this feeling before. Not in-game, but in those mountains, in that very casino. Today, Google Maps tells me that it’s permanently closed, and it’s neon has sadly burned out. The souls that filled that floor found somewhere else to be or didn’t. The t-shirt I bought as a joke is the last relic of a place that existed purely for the people inside it, and one day those people walked out the doors, never to return. I think about them sometimes, and wonder how the stories of their wins and losses exist as a metaphorical treasure trapped within the casino’s halls, as it withers away, returning to salvage.
I don’t know what Marathon’s numbers look like next year. I can’t tell you whether the servers will be warm in 2027. What I know is that right now, tonight, somewhere in the fog of Tau Ceti IV, the regulars are logging on. The guy who knifed me last Wednesday. The squad that robbed the boys and me clean on Monday night. The solo rook that waits in the shadows, ready to take everything you’ve worked for, we’re all here squabbling it out as we build our own legends of triumph and defeat.
We’ll keep walking through that same door. Weirdly enough, sometimes a place finds you before you find it, and you can either trespass or assimilate, and for me, I’m not leaving until they turn the lights off. Whether we win or lose, we’ll run it back, because it’s our little bloody oasis, and only escape will make us Gods.
Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)
The PVP at the regular casino is terrible. All the seniors there go in with cheap kits, they don't even have guns.
I wish I could write like you, even just a little. Could we Freaky Friday body-swap for a day, so I can take notes and NOT steal your banking information? LMK.