Drew and I are both extremely excited about the trailer for Halo 3: Recon. There are a number of things in there that give us reason to hope that Bungie, now free of Microsoft, is going to make a Halo game that reaches back to the best, most complex aspects of Marathon.

Marathon had the player running around doing the bidding of a number of AIs in various stages of Rampancy (basically: hyper-intelligent insanity). Often, it was unclear what was going on, what the AIs really wanted or if they were trying to help or harm you. The Marathon trilogy was one of the first to wrestle with the issues of control and freedom that are explored more and more frequently as time goes on.

The first Marathon game came out in 1994. Back then, expensive storage, limited computing power, and comparatively small game budgets conspired to keep things like cutscenes and the highly-scripted storytelling we often see today out of games. The story of Marathon was told through terminals the player would find throughout the world. Through those terminals, they would receive messages from the AIs (or intercept other bits of information). Because there was no guarantee that the player would find terminals in order (or even find a given terminal at all), piecing together the story was a complex, non-linear, iterative task. It only got more complex as the series went on.

Complexity in its own right doesn’t make for a great story (or game), but it does allow for a kind of depth that just doesn’t happen in most modern games. Similarly, an obfuscated, hard-to-follow story with nothing buried deeper is just frustrating. Marathon was brilliant largely because there was a readily available, comprehensible story at the same time that there was so much to discover and think about. A community of fans spent years mulling over the Marathon story and kept coming to new, non-trivial revelations over that time.

All of that had the effect of creating an atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion, and confusion. What am I doing here? What does this mean? I know there is more here, but I feel powerless because I can’t comprehend it. Those feelings are hard to replicate in an environment where things are spelled out and the story is finite, where there’s a hard wall circumscribing the game world, and where franchised novels spell everything out. I assure you: there was no Marathon novel.

In that regard, Halo fell far short for me of what I hoped it would be. The story was simple; there was little to doubt or wonder about (except for some very clearly labeled mysteries like “who are the Forerunner?”). You could always trust Cortana. She had a nice, friendly, attractive female avatar. Those of us who played Marathon were briefly hopeful when Cortana was let loose in Halo’s control center (and again on High Charity), but were disappointed when she wasn’t a little demented as a result. It wasn’t until Halo 3 when we saw the brief return of terminals and a little bit of that old Bungie magic shone through, and shine it did.

Like the Marathon terminals, the Halo 3 terminals gave the player disparate pieces that wove together in a non-obvious, but non-trivial way. They never spelled anything out, and we had to infer who was writing. Were they an AI? The Flood? Forerunner? With Cortana, we always had an avatar to identify with, but never really got to know her mind. Here, it’s exactly the opposite.

From the pieces of story we gather from the terminals, we could imagine a much, much larger universe than we were ever shown directly in the rest of the Halo series combined. Suddenly, we went from seeing small fractions of planets and space stations down the barrel of a gun to imagining a war on a galactic scale where entire stars were destroyed to stop an enemy’s advance.

Whew.

So about that picture at the top of this post. That’s a picture of a human looking at a sign controlled by some kind of municipal superintendent AI. The AI, evidently somewhat damaged, is using the signs to communicate and direct the human against an alien army. This is beginning to sound excitingly familiar. I very much recommend watching the trailer.

Some things I found particularly exciting:

• The AI is evidently damaged; when it reboots, a message appears (34 seconds into the trailer) that reads “CORE DATA CORRUPTION.” We now have a reason to distrust the AI (that will almost certainly be the major guiding force for the player throughout the game).
• The protagonist’s origin is unknown; when the AI attempts to identify the crashed drop pod, it gets blocked by some security protocol (1 minute, 11 seconds in).
• The AI decides the protagonist is somehow important and proceeds to monitor the drop pod.
• While monitoring, the AI takes over nearby signage (1 minute, 17 seconds or for the curious, 77 seconds).
• The AI shuts down the sign to avoid detection by the Covenant. It’s clearly intelligent enough to do more than issue parking tickets at this point (1 minute, 24 seconds).
• Finally, the AI starts guiding the protagonist using signs.
• The scene at the end (the screenshot at the top of this post) is evocative of Craig Mullins’ paintings for the Marathon series.

Anyhow, the short version is that I’m very, very excited about where this might be going in a way that I never was for the Halo series. Good luck, Bungie. Please let this one live up to its potential.