After I get things under control for my fall teaching schedule, though, perhaps I’ll finally get around to installing Leopard, making a reasonably sized Windows partition, and playing this game firsthand rather than just reading about it all the time (and Planescape: Torment, while I’m at it).

Seems that you folks have simply forgotten one of the more obscure FPSs
that in itself had a quite engaging story that had fairly major consequences for the choices made as far as the storyline development was concerned.
Two words…DEUS EX. Now go play it again, providing you can.

I think Marathon might also have been a product of it’s times to some extent, a time somewhere between the full-text nature of computer gaming (games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity) and the full 3d experience (Doom, Quake, etc)- when reading lots of text in-game would have been seen as almost inconsequential in light of the 3d experience concurrently presented.

“I underestimated, way underestimated, the impact the story was going to have on people,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would change people’s perspective on what to expect from gameplay.”

Levine said that when writing a story, deep down he never really expect people to pay attention to it.

“I didn’t think they became that invested in what was going on,” he said. In BioShock “you have this great mystery of your own identity and once it is solved the story is over.”

“I think it was a miscalculation on my part.”