Earlier today the world's attention was turned towards a post on the Marathon Subreddit, and the story about a guy called 'Steve'.
Steve's tale is an odd but also familiar one. A long-time friend of the OP, Carpocalypto, the story goes that Steve is an infrequent gamer, but one who recently picked up Marathon under the mistaken impression it was like the original Mac games and had been playing it entirely wrong, for hours and hours, weeks and weeks.
Here is a list of things we talked through once we partied up and I discovered something was amiss:
-Steve thought the point of the game was to kill as many robots as possible, like the old Mac games. That's it. He had never extracted, at least to his knowledge.
-Steve had not completed a single quest (completed/claimed rewards).
-Steve had not claimed a single faction agent reward package.
-Steve had not done any 'Introducing...' quests to unlock other factions.
-Steve had not claimed a single codex entry.
-Steve wasn't sure if he'd ever been killed by another player.
And it just goes on and on and on. Eventually, after linking up to play together online, Steve is shown how to actually play Marathon, and enjoys it so much he reportedly ends up texting 'Exfilling while I'm mid fire fight with a huge amount of loot and still smoking fools is next to heaven!"
There's a lot to be gained here, a lot to take from this story. There are onboarding issues with modern game design to unpack, there's the beauty of a friend holding your hand and showing you the wonders of a video game. There's the blissful ignorance of how Steve had been playing the game up until Level 45 without understanding some of its most basic concepts, yet had obviously still been finding some kind of fun there regardless.
Then, of course, there's the matter of whether Steve is even a real person. He could be real; OP posts a few videos in an update at the end of the post that claim to prove this, but it's the internet in 2026, so who knows. A lot of people in the thread, and beyond, have serious doubts about it.
I don't think it matters if Marathon Steve is real or not, because Marathon Steve is more interesting as a parable than he is as a person. He's a type of gamer who I'm sure we have all met and even played with at some point or another. I know multiple Crusader Kings Steves, who ignore the game's Crusades and elections and research and construction systems to focus only on dynastic politics and locking their enemies in dungeons. I've seen NBA2K Steves in the wild, who will only play the game's league/manager mode, leaving whole swathes of its most polished and focused content untouched.
Similarly, I'm a Hearts Of Iron Steve myself; while I at least know about the depth of the game's production, supply and organisational screens, I often just like to jump on as Australia, train some divisions then send them 'I'm helping' style off to the front for some quick battlemap drawings. And that's fine, I love that! Even knowing I'm neglecting entire systems, I am picking my own fun blocks out of this video game's toybox.
Whether Steve is real or not, or whether this story is even about Marathon or not isn't really the point here. What I think we all got out of reading this story is that we all know a Steve, and we've all been a Steve.
