Bungie Will Finally Showcase Its Gorgeous New Sci-Fi Shooter

Marathon is Bungie’s first new project in over a decade. It feels like a lot is riding on the extraction shooter as the studio behind Halo and Destiny becomes slowly subsumed into the larger PlayStation portfolio. But in the meantime, all we know is Marathon continues to be one of the coolest-looking shooters around and is about to get its big gameplay showcase reveal later this month.

An ARG (Alternate Reality Game) seeded late last week resulted in fans across Discord and Reddit deciphering clues in artwork and brief teaser footage. Once they eventually cracked the code it confirmed a date of April 12 for Marathon’s first big gameplay showcase. News, development updates, and footage will go live at 1:00 p.m. ET on Saturday on Twitch and YouTube, and content creators have already hinted at hands-on impressions going up around the same time.

Marathon, a call back to the 1994 Doom-like sci-fi shooter of the same name that Bungie made for the Apple Macintosh (currently on Steam), was first revealed at Sony’s 2023 May PlayStation showcase. Players step into the space boots of disposable cybernetic bodies called Runners to explore the harsh and mysterious planet of Tau Ceti IV. Outside of it being a PvP extraction shooter (think Escape From Tarkov) with loot and character classes, little else is known about the the next big PS5 live-service game (it’ll be on Xbox Series X/S and PC as well).

According to a previous report by Insider Gaming, Bungie is aiming for near breakneck matchmaking times with Marathon so that players spend as little time waiting around in lobbies a possible. And a key source of tension in matches will apparently arise from limited oxygen supplies which dwindle more quickly as players take damage. It could be a neat mix alongside Bungie’s best-in-class gunplay feel, but a lot will come down to whether Marathon’s world building, gameplay, and player progression can match the intrigue and hype of its eye-catching art.

Bloomberg reported last year that former Marathon director and long-time Bungie veteran Chris Barratt had been fired over creepy texts he sent female colleagues (he claims it was because Sony didn’t want to pay him massive stock bonuses and is currently suing, but the text messages speak for themselves). There was subsequent reporting that the game was not shaping up well (something reiterated to me by a few ex-Bungie staff as well), and fans were surprised to see a strange one-off “proof of life” YouTube update on the status of the project last fall from game director Joe Ziegler.

We’ll have a better idea of how Marathon is shaping up once this weekend’s showcase and hands-on impressions go live. It didn’t sound like a 2025 game the way Ziegler talked about back in October, but hopefully players will be able to get a sense of it for themselves in a closed beta in the not-too-distant future.

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