The Number Seven

While a far cry from Marathon's perverse seven obsession, Myth still shows some symptoms of Bungie's mathematical fetish.

• Seven Gates.
• The first half of Myth takes place in the seventeenth year of the war.
• The prologue was written in the seventh year of the war.
• Six Fallen Lords plus Balor makes...
• In an early press release, Bungie said Myth's comet passed every seventy years.
• The Bungie web site had an alternate Myth introduction text: "Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the next seventy years, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten."
• It took seven waves of Thrall (plus The Watcher) to kill Mazzarin.
• There are seven marker stones in Bagrada (from Beguiler)
• Liam Coonan points out that there are seven gravestones in the graveyard on Silvermines.
• Archer in the Asylum points out that there are 49 Dreams of Wyrd, where 49 is seven squared.

Left Arms

Evidence for this is pretty tentative, but it seems that Bungie might have a penchant for left arms.

Read about the Watcher's two left arms here.

If you played Marathon 1, you might have noticed the player punched with his left hand. (In subsequent Marathons he used both fists.)

sattreed@frontiernet.net points out that it's the cyborg's left arm that appears in the Marathon Infinity final screen.

Is someone at Bungie a southpaw, or am I just grasping at straws?

Pathways into Darkness

The venerable Hamish Sinclair has established several links between Bungie's first major game, Pathways Into Darkness, and Marathon. Might there be a connection between Myth and Pathways? Until I received Christopher Powell's email I would have said no.

By pure chance I stumbled across a PBS special on the city of Copan and something twigged. A quick jaunt to the library later, I confirmed my suspicion - some members of the ancient Mayan nobility had names like "Lady Six Sky" and "18 Jog Jaguar", names that strongly resemble the Journeyman names in Myth (i.e. start with numbers, feature an animal's name, etc.). I had thought that Myth represented a complete break from the Pathways/Marathon Universe, but evidently there's some kind of link between the Empire of the Cath Bruig and Classic Mayan civilization of the Yucutan Peninsula and, of course, the Yucutan was where that pyramid in Pathways and its slumbering Cthulhuian god was located ...

Uh oh.

SteelClasher writes to us with a fascinating theory suggesting Myth and Pathways are directly linked.

Say that Balor's head was thrown into the great devoid. Then a new civilization comes along and sees this evil spewing hole. Perhaps they built a temple on it to contain the evil which was balor's head slowly morphing into what they thought was the "dreaming god"? and the bottle that The german soldiers were looking for that held some great power... could it have been the tain? Trapped far underground? And the area around the temple in PID was noted to be jungle. Very similar to the swampy area and thick vegetation around the devoid. Which itself had NO vegetation near it like the temple.

This one's definitely "out there", but food for thought.

SteelClasher writes again, this time about the similarities between PiD zombies and Myth Myrmidons, among other things...

The zombies in PID are very similar to myrmidons. They both attack at about the same speed and both turn to dust when they die and especially, BOTH ARE SKELETONS! The vial in the game released some sort of unstoppable creature,(Myrkridia maybe?) Plus, ghols are similar to skitters, short, fast, and easy to kill, The phantasms resemble soulless.

My great shame is that I've never played PiD, so I can't comment. Maybe you can.

Hamish Sinclair tips us off to a discussion about Pathways and Myth that appeared on his site several months ago, before Myth had been released.

You can read the whole discussion in the entry for September 15, 1997 here.

Among the interesting facts revealed in the discussion:

Around September 1997, Bungie's website started advertising Pathways with this catch line:

Pathways Into Darkness
The original Bungie 3-D adventure game.
Solve the riddles of a thousand years and save humanity. [first noticed by Jim Mitchell's Pathways Into Darkness Story Page]

No mention of "riddles of a thousand years" is made in the actual game, Bungie simply tagged it on right before Myth was released. As Hamish remarks:

Whether this is a deliberate attempt to tie all 3 games with a millennia theme who can tell?