The Anomaly of Humanity as A.I. Grows Inevitable

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Critic’s Notebook

The Anomaly of Humanity as A.I. Grows Inevitable

Over the decades, the depiction of artificial intelligence has evolved from sci-fi villain to systemic reality.

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In the extraction shooter Marathon, which unfolds in a universe created in the mid-1990s, artificial intelligence is no longer a distant, unlikely concept.

Credit...

Bungie

By

Yussef Cole

March 25, 2026,

5:01 a.m. ET

Players take up the role of runners, free-floating consciousness beamed across space into the hollow shells of mindless synthetic bodies, in Marathon, the newest game by the studio behind the sci-fi behemoths Halo and Destiny. These temporary forms have been built as part of a reckless hunt for treasure and answers in a distant colony project that collapsed a hundred years before.

A hundred years is just what it feels like since the game’s precursor series, also called Marathon, was released for the Macintosh Operating System in the mid-1990s.

At that time, artificial intelligence floated safely in the realm of science fiction: the onboard computer HAL 9000, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or the philosophical dilemmas presented by Asimov, Herbert and Clarke. The internet was clunky and difficult to access, and video games were played in the darkness of a den with the blinds drawn, or in a home office on a big beige box. Waiting for our modems to crawlingly bring us online to read our five emails, A.I. seemed like an idea for a distant and unimaginable future.

The contemporary

Marathon, a challenging extraction shooter

, was released this month into a vastly different context. Video games have burst into the mainstream, with stars like Megan Thee Stallion cosplaying Tekken characters in music videos, and grannies grinding out levels in Bejeweled. Far from being a distant, unlikely concept or a conventional sci-fi villain, A.I. now seems inevitable. Large language models sit just a prompt away, having infiltrated everything from Word documents to kitchen appliances.

Unlike

the colorful game Doom

, from which it liberally borrows its mechanics and first-person, quasi-3-D approach, the original Marathon was dark and monotonously gray. It was forged from the era’s cold, hard sci-fi aesthetic. Gunmetal walls and brown bulwarks stretch through the cavernous interiors of the moon-size spaceship U.E.S.C. Marathon. Players control a nameless security officer, sent in vain to rid the colony ship of an alien invasion. Much of the game involves tense shootouts against waves of grunting alien soldiers in narrow, mazelike corridors.

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