Easter eggs: Difference between revisions

The [[Marathon]] series began and ended before Oni's release, and was a major source of new Bungie fans in the ten years before Bungie released Halo.

The first Oni trailer featured [[wp:Marathon (video game)|Marathon]] symbols on the crates (TTC 38 seconds :-). In-game, the Marathon symbol can be seen on the hull of the [[TCTF]] computer [[Damocles]] in [[{{C6}}]] and [[{{C13}}]] (see texture TXMPTC_SHCOMP2 as well as [[:Image:Damocles 1.jpg|this concept art]]). Fans certainly did not miss this, so Harry brought it up in [http://oni.bungie.org/special/part1/alex.html his interview with Alex Okita]:

A weapon called "Wave Motion Cannon" was [https://marathon.bungie.org/story/weapons.html cut from Marathon]. Like Marathon's other joke weapon, "Pirated [[wp:Copland (operating system)|Copland]] beta", it is just a string in the resources, not a usable weapon. As we know, the [[Wave Motion Cannon]] is the biggest weapon in Oni, and the only one to support 2 firing modes.

The word [[wikt:rampant|rampant]] had existed before Bungie, but the specific concept of "[[wp:Marathon_Trilogy#Rampancy|rampancy]]", referring to an AI that goes out of control and acts with free will, was coined and subsequently developed by the Marathon team (this concept was revisited by [[wp:343 Industries|343 Industries]] for Halo 4). The three/four stages of a rampant AI are Melancholia, Anger, Jealousy, and Metastability. An egotistical level of self-awareness accompanies the development of the AI's personality. The tirades of the [[Deadly Brain]] (only seen in the subtitles) are a reference to this, as shown by Shinatama's statement, "Clearly, it's gone rampant." However, a rampancy in Marathon takes place when an AI is exposed to large amounts of data for a long enough period of time. Here, the Deadly Brain is a disembodied human brain, and it is essentially just going crazy because Konoko "decoupled its core logic" (how exactly does one do that to a human brain, anyway?).

This one is actually a back-reference to Oni from a later game. Oni doesn't refer to Halo (unless you count the [[Oni matrix]] or the fan project [[AE:BGI]]), but [[wp:Halo (franchise)|Halo]] features an entity called ONI. It stands for [https://www.halopedia.org/Office_of_Naval_Intelligence Office of Naval Intelligence]. A military intelligence service called the Office of Naval Intelligence [[wp:Office of Naval Intelligence|actually exists]]: it's the United States' oldest continuously operating intelligence service (since 1882). It seems likely that Halo develops on that longevity and tries to imagine what influence today's ONI would have in the 2550s.

There has been a lot of speculation around Halo's ONI, most of which you can see on the [http://halostory.bungie.org/oni.html Halo Story Page]. A specific entry which draws the parallel between Halo's ONI, the [[Oni (myth)|Japanese myth of the oni]], and Bungie's "Oni" is [http://halostory.bungie.org/newssearch.html?newsitem=695 HERE].

Some features of the engine were not fully utilized by the game. In one case, a feature was even obscured by a bug: the AI knew how to dodge gunfire but were not looking at the right axes to reliably do this. This was fixed by Neo in a patch made with the [[Daodan DLL]], resulting in much smarter behavior by AIs under fire.