We started on Perimeter, the map tuned to provide the “easiest” experience in Marathon, and spent the next 15 minutes trapped in the very first building we entered, fighting every single team of player “Runners” in the match.
It was GameSpot senior producer Jean-Luc Seipke’s very first match in Bungie’s online first-person extraction shooter, and it was nothing if not a trial by fire. Together with our matchmade teammate, we battled down hallways and around corners, flanking and catching opponents out, dying and reviving one another time and again. We came back from near-defeat over and over, hanging on by a thread.
At one point, with my guns completely dry, I slipped an opponent by hopping over a railing to a lower floor, only to sneak back up the stairs, find them facing away, and knife them in the back until they died. Another time, an invisible Assassin character lost us in a cloud of smoke, and I jumped through some broken windows into the room where we’d last seen them, hoping to flank–only to find them hiding in a corner, a claymore at the door, ready to ambush my teammates. They never even saw me as I machine-gunned them.
