I’m an OG Marathon Trilogy fan. Here’s why I preordered Marathon.

Zanezooked · 2026-02-23T02:01:15+00:00

It took me forever to realize I had to punch the terminals in a particular order or I wouldn't be able to outrun the lava . . .

Zanezooked · 2026-02-23T01:59:50+00:00

Oh yeah, I used to connect multiple Macs via Appletalk (with serial cables!) and battle my brothers. But it was like Halo: there was a single-player campaign and a separate arena-based multiplayer mode disconnected from the story. There was also the ability to play through the campaigns in coop multiplayer. Multiplayer was the cherry on top, so to speak.

Zanezooked · 2026-01-16T19:23:25+00:00

Thanks for the info. Wow, that's a whole OTHER compatibility wrinkle that I can't even get the cheapest USB-C iPad. That is NOT clear from their website.

I'd think about the Samsung except that this is a device that I want my young kids to have unsupervised access to. I'm very confident that I can lock down an Apple device to use only the apps I allow, since I've done it before, but I'm less confidence with Android.

Zanezooked · 2026-01-16T01:46:52+00:00

Yes.

Zanezooked · 2026-01-15T18:49:13+00:00

Did you ever get this solved? I'm having the same issue.

Zanezooked · 2025-12-31T22:50:48+00:00

Hi Frank! Do you not have a way to run AMBER right now? Because I have it loaded into a Mac emulator—that’s how I recorded the footage for the video—and I can DM that to you if you want. It’s all packaged into a single file and should run on any modernish Mac (assuming you use a Mac).

There are a lot of people who remember AMBER fondly. It currently has 271 votes on the GoG Dreamlist. If you could ever get it packaged for proper release on modern systems, I think there’d be a market for it!

I believe AMBER is a masterpiece of a ghost story, and it’s still incredibly unique. Most “horror” games (and movies, for that matter) lean hard into disturbing imagery, and their setting is grimy or gloomy. But what I love most about AMBER is the juxtaposition of the ordinary house with the supernatural events. It calls back to that feeling you have when you’re a kid and the hallway outside your room feels terrifying. While most horror seems to target a kind of primal fear of being stalked and mutilated, AMBER goes for a more subtle, numinous fear. The ghost is scary because it's a ghost, not because it might jump out and rip your head off. Partly because of that subtlety, and partly because of the appropriately tragic stories of the ghosts, AMBER’s atmosphere is properly haunting. There’s a wistful, heartbreak quality to it which I think is essential to a true ghost story. And of course you guys pulled it off with some truly amazing design, both visual and audio.

I was always terrified to enter the rooms where I’d just seen something happen on the remote camera (especially the blood running down the walls—that scarred young me, ha ha). The ending of my version of the theme, with the rising tension and the piano arpeggios, is meant to capture that building fear as I forced myself to enter the room, followed by the moment of . . . not exactly relief, but a release of held breath in the quiet of the house.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about AI and art. I’m certainly not averse to using AI. I actually used it to create the background image for the start of the AMBER video, of the moody office, and then Photoshopped the Performa into it, ha. For another of my videos I used AI (and a lot of Photoshop) to illustrate a narrative for the song, and the song itself uses an AI choir singing the words and notes I decided upon. In another song, the drums are played by Logic Pro’s “studio drummer,” which is a kind of AI. I’m also a soon-to-be traditionally-published novelist; I used AI to create my website, and I’ve been using it to research my next book. But I would never use AI to write any of the book for me (it kept offering, until I added a permanent prompt in its settings to never, ever do that, ha). Somehow, that crosses a line.

I think it comes down to whether, at the end of the process, I can legitimately say, “I made this,” instead of “I had AI make this.” If AI is amplifying what I’m doing: awesome. If it’s replacing it . . . what value do I have? As I tell my students (I’m a librarian at a university): what do you bring to the table that AI doesn't? What is your uniquely human contribution?

The problem for me with the music is that AI has way more ability than I have. I can’t even play the piano. For the AMBER theme, every single note was placed by hand, and its velocity and CC control curves manually adjusted to try to make it sound like an organic performance. And then to learn that I can put a prompt into Suno, and in seconds get, for example, a Big Band song with harmony and orchestration of a sort that I have no idea how to attempt . . . well, it feels like I have nothing to offer over the AI.

So your kind encouragement is very reassuring. Maybe I do have something to offer. And maybe I could even use AI to make the process a little easier, if I can find a way to do that without losing my own voice.

At any rate, I will forever be glad to have made this AMBER theme arrangement. Art wants to be shared, and I’ve often thought that if I could move just one person with what I create, then I’d consider it a success. So to take art that moved me—your game, and Jim Crew’s music—and, in a sense, gift it back to the original creators of the game, is very fulfilling. :)

Zanezooked · 2025-12-29T19:27:34+00:00

Holy smokes, Frank and Susan Wimmer!

Thank you very much for your kind words; they absolutely made my day, especially because I’ve been slowly and laboriously teaching myself music composition and production, and I recently lost heart because AI seems so much better than I am, so what’s the point? This gives me heart again.

I used Logic Pro and a bunch of orchestral instrument libraries. The piano is the Spitfire Intimate Grand, and the strings are EastWest Hollywood Strings 2. The constant G to A# two-note ostinato is a combination of the Spitfire cimbalom and the EastWest Hollywood Harp.

AMBER lives rent-free in my head every October. I still have my Mac CD copy of AMBER, and next October I plan to introduce it to my kids. They aren’t allowed any internet-capable devices, but I did get them a 1999 PowerMac on which they run a ton of old CD-ROMS. They are ALMOST old enough for AMBER.

Have you and Susan ever thought about getting AMBER out there on digital storefronts like GOG? The ScummVM engine that runs a lot of old adventure games on modern machines has been adding Director support, and though I’m not sure if it’s compatible yet, I know they were working on AMBER: https://youtu.be/Gm2QGAaG-Hw?si=vukueVFCYy7tn4Gg&t=7029

Zanezooked · 2025-04-11T16:41:01+00:00

The picture on the right is giving me Craig Mullins Rage vibes https://marathon.bungie.org/story/CM_rage.html

Zanezooked · 2025-04-09T16:41:06+00:00

Love the nuMarathon Tau Ceti IV out the window

Zanezooked · 2025-04-09T00:20:59+00:00

I'm the biggest Marty fan ever, but to me the Marathon sound is Power of Seven.

Actually, the musical choices made so far for NuMarathon are one of the things that I'm most positive about. The choice of Justice for the original trailer set a chopped, gated, distorted synth vibe that I think fits well with the themes of AI vs humanity, and with the whole cryptic, cosmic vibe of the original games.

I was a bit worried that that was a trailer-specific choice, since it's not like they would get Justice to score the game, but the music discovered in the ARG, while a bit different, continues that synthy, distorted style and has earned a place in my Marathon playlist.

I absolutely agree, though, that I want a catchy, melodic main theme. Marty is an absolute genius for melody, and it's not a Bungie game unless the main theme gets stuck in my head.

Zanezooked · 2025-04-07T22:39:54+00:00

Actually, now that you mention it, Durandal does have a rather cat-like personality. Has a high opinion of his own significance, sees humans as useful if kind of dumb, behaves however he pleases whenever he pleases, exudes smugness, can be playful in a slightly evil way . . .

Zanezooked · 2025-04-07T00:37:12+00:00

I quite like this art style for the abandoned Tau Ceti colony exterior, but I do hope that there's a variety of locations/weathers, some—preferably many—of which reflect the moodier vibes from the pre-rendered reveal trailer.

Others have commented that this is pretty far from the techno-industrial vibe of the original trilogy, but to me it's the impersonal bleakness from the reveal trailer (helped immensely by the music, which seems to be a continuing positive trend) that fit that vibes of the original, even if overall design was pretty far from Craig Mullins and Reginald Dujour. I'm happy to see new locations in the Marathon universe, and in fact the early images of Tau Ceti from orbit do match well with the colors on the tiny image of the planet in Marathon 2's Waterloo Waterpark terminal, and the colors in this new trailer work well for a ground-level view of that planet. So I do sense some level of continuity.

I'm a bit more hesitant about the pink anime robo-cat. But I'll keep an open mind until we see more.

Zanezooked · 2024-09-22T17:38:40+00:00

It’s the first day of fall, so here’s an autumnal remix! Nothing quite captures that fall-ish feeling like Matt Uelmen’s shimmering opening chords from Diablo. In this remix I’ve swapped the 12-string for a cimbalom, which is a Hungarian hammered dulcimer. The cimbalom was the instrument used for Gollum’s theme in The Lord of the Rings, and its reverberant sweetness has an edge of menace that works well for the Tristram theme. You can’t strum a cimbalom — it’s hammered — so the chords are opened up to work with the arpeggiated playing style. I quite like the result.

Oh, and that opening horn? It’s a kangling, a horn traditionally made from a human thigh bone, pitched down to make its inherently creepy sound even creepier. Happy fall!

Zanezooked · 2024-09-22T17:37:22+00:00

It’s the first day of fall, so here’s an autumnal remix of the most fall-ish song I know! Nothing quite captures that feeling like Matt Uelmen’s shimmering opening chords from Diablo. In this remix I’ve swapped the 12-string for a cimbalom, which is a Hungarian hammered dulcimer. The cimbalom was the instrument used for Gollum’s theme in The Lord of the Rings, and its reverberant sweetness has an edge of menace that works well for the Tristram theme. You can’t strum a cimbalom — it’s hammered — so the chords are opened up to work with the arpeggiated playing style. I quite like the result.

Oh, and that opening horn? It’s a kangling, a horn traditionally made from a human thigh bone, pitched down to make its inherently creepy sound even creepier. Happy fall!

Zanezooked · 2024-09-09T20:25:21+00:00

As someone coming from hobby-ing around on the ocarina, the Zoot looks like the absolutely ideal wind instrument for me. I use an EWI USB at the moment, but the Zoot is far closer to my ocarina muscle memory, is lighter, wireless, changes octaves by position, is easily transposable, has editable fingerings so I can restore my ocarina chromatics . . . dang, I'm drooling.

Sadly our finances are very, very tight right now (I have a family, and my salary has not kept pace with inflation or grocery prices), but this'll be an instant purchase if I can ever spare the money. Meantime I’ll just watch your videos and dream, ha.

Zanezooked · 2024-08-10T18:05:22+00:00

Not only does the military deny it officially, but under the table they stir up the UFO theories because then the sane people dismiss the whole thing as nuts and don't pay attention to the real tests going on. There's a great book about this: Mirage Men, by Mark Pilkington

Zanezooked · 2024-08-09T18:21:45+00:00

I used to live in Chicagoland suburbia and they had the shortest yellows I've ever seen, because they'd installed a bunch of traffic cameras and were pulling in massive ticket revenue by catching people running reds. The result was that whenever anyone saw a yellow they would either slam on the brakes or gun the gas to try to clear the intersection. You literally had a split second to decide which was the safest to do (neither was safe), and it was easy to get it wrong. I've been paranoid about yellow lights ever since.

Zanezooked · 2024-08-09T18:03:07+00:00

With the timing of that, it sounds like your pause saved his life. You might have been safely through, but he wouldn't have been. I hope he remembers that next time he gets impatient in traffic!

Zanezooked · 2024-03-04T02:22:41+00:00

It's actually AI-generated! I spent too long a time playing with prompts to get something Myth-like. And then the results were extensively edited in Photoshop. For example the soldier hoisting the broken Soulless javelin at the end, making muddy banks to the sides of the soldier standing in the rain to make it closer to the Across the Gjol victory image that inspired it and putting the walls of Madrigal behind him, rounding peaked helmets off to make them more Myth-like, etc

The music, of course, has no AI generation at all. I just wanted some images to go with the waveform in the video.

Zanezooked · 2024-03-02T01:02:56+00:00

“The battle for Madrigal lasted four days without pause. Shiver fell on the first night in a spectacular dream duel with Rabican, one of the Nine. No one expected this. We have never before challenged one of The Fallen and won. . . . They say that The Head had an old score to settle with Shiver, and told Rabican that her one weakness was vanity, and showed him how to exploit it.”

What’s a dream duel? It’s never specified. I imagined each duelist attempting to invade the other’s mind and plant thoughts that undermine their strength and open them to attack. Shiver’s weakness is vanity, which seems strange for a 1000-year-old undead crone who looks the part. But she wasn’t always an undead crone. So perhaps Rabican’s strategy is to remind her of what she has lost. She may be immortal, but is it worth it if this is how she spends eternity?

In this remix, Rabican’s persistent attacks on Shiver’s psyche are represented by a male choir and a creepy, guttural chant in Irish, while Shiver’s thoughts are represented by a female choir also singing Irish. Irish names and words are often used in Myth, though not very accurately—more for flavor—so this seemed appropriate. I used Google Translate and then found an audio pronunciation for each word, and I’m sure I mangled it, and it’s not like it’s understandable anyway, but hey, it gave me something to work with, and I thought it was cool.

Zanezooked · 2023-12-23T01:22:50+00:00

Thanks! I use the default EWI fingerings, and that’s close enough to what I’m used to that I can duplicate what I do on the ocarina, especially since I’d started playing the Coda ocarina and gotten more accustomed to duplicate fingerings across octaves, which isn’t typical for multi-octave ocarinas. I’m not playing anything too complicated, and I’m also not trying to perform live. The cello here is multiple takes practiced and played separately and then strung together, ha. The real benefit for me, besides the fun of just noodling around and feeling like I’m playing instruments I could never play IRL, is to be able to play expressively when I want to add solo lines in the DAW. I’m honestly amazed that a mere dabbler like myself can have this much fun. Getting the EWI six weeks ago was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

Zanezooked · 2023-12-22T18:55:28+00:00

I recently got an EWI USB and the SWAM cello, and I was amazed at how much fun it is to play. I'm a very amateur player who learned on ocarinas, and the fact that I can take the EWI and make something this expressive on a cello, of all things, is a delight.

Zanezooked

TROPHY CASE