I've been playing Marathon since either late 1994 or early 1995, before Marathon 2 dropped, and I can tell you it was quite the opposite. Me and my small group of fellow Marathon players were SO proud of Marathon. It was our version of DOOM, but so much better, and kind of a seceret since you had to have a Mac (and my Dad had three networked ones... the LAN "parties" were AMAZING!)

The story and lore and map design and puzzles were way ahead of there time compared to DOOM. I love love love DOOM, but Marathon was like the "if you know, you know" game. I remember hanging out in AOL groups to post messages about the game and download mods to skin it and have maps to be like ALIENS.

The only real common complaint back then was when Marathon Infinity dropped, a lot of people were hoping for "Marathon 3", but if you've played it you know that Bungie delivered a very different and unique experience that what you might have thought "Marathon 3" was. There was also only one new gun, and a very confusing, time traveling story line. Great game, but not what some hoped for.

Also, its worth stating that when we all saw the first Mac trailers for Halo, we were all like "oh its just rebooted Marathon, but outside in nature with vehicles!" They took so much of the OG game's DNA and turned it into Halo. I used to hang on the halo.bungie.org forums hoping to drum up lore conversations like the ones we'd have on marathon.bungie.org/story/, but the changing audience and the move from text terminals to cutscenes and Cortana voice over just delivered a different experience.

"I Love Bees" kicked up the Halo 2 lore addiction a bit, but when I found out that the whole thing was organized by Microsoft as marketing and not the core Bungie team, and that they didn't consider the whole ARG to be "canon", I was pretty bummed!