It’s an absolutely fascinating — in that very 2026, can’t-look-away-from-a-car-crash sense of the word — time for Marathon to launch. Just one of several elephant-sized problems in the games industry has been a series of failures of several hugely expensive attempts to strike gold with a new live-service title, and claim a piece of that Fortnite-level success (the level attained before the makers of Fortnite themselves laid off a thousand workers this month, I suppose). Storied studio Bungie’s first new game since 2017 is therefore going over the top soon after having watched a number of its fellow would-be live-service shooter hits being pitilessly mown down by gamer indifference after just a few steps. Yikes.
But this is Bungie, creator of Destiny, Halo and, going even further back still, the original Marathon. The first in their line of sci-fi shooters was notable to those of us in the Dad-gamer bracket who can remember it for 1) its extensive, intriguing plot and 2) being the only game that made you sad you didn’t own a Mac (bizarrely to consider now, it was a platform exclusive). So: can one of the few studios with a track record of live-service success turn one of their old properties into another hit amid the carnage?
For those not old enough to have gone over to their mate’s place to check the original out on his Dad’s work computer, 1994’s Marathon was set around the first human extra-solar colony of Tau Ceti IV in the year 2794; the eponymous vessel is the massive ship that delivered the colonists from Earth. Without trying to recap the entire plot of the original game and its two sequels, things go very wrong indeed for this particular endeavour. Cut now to the year 2893: in Marathon (2026), after 99 years of mysterious silence, a call for help finally reaches Earth from the lost colony. Various factions and corporations are not only eager to discover what happened on the now deserted Tau Ceti IV, but to ameliorate what losses they can after their massive investments in the colony project. Planetary government the UESC puts the whole place on lockdown though, so these factions are forced to turn to the regulation-dodging practice of using Runners (that’s you, and all other players). These (sort of) people are disembodied human minds, stored and updated constantly on hard drives, who upload their consciousness into various types of android shells 3D-printed by techno-silkworms (yes really). Each of the seven initial selectable shell types offers a different suite of abilities; the Thief can get around quickly via grappling hook for example, while the Triage can heal allies. Thus reincarnated and empowered, the Runners explore the inanely dangerous ruins of the Tau Ceti colony, looking to plunder valuables, complete jobs for the factions and find out more about the fate of the colony. Death is thus not the end, but just necessitates an upload into another body.
Which as just as well. For Marathon is an extraction shooter; you, either solo or in a team (usually of three, but an experimental duo mode is also now available), are dropped into a map with several other player teams dotted around who-knows-where, and while the AI-enemy UESC robots that patrol are more than capable of causing you serious problems, it is more likely your day will be (repeatedly) ruined by your fellow players in PvP encounters. Go down, and you become merely a bag of goodies to loot — what was yours is now theirs, and all the guns, equipment, valuables or whatever else you were carrying is lost for good. Only by lugging your booty to a designated exfil marker and escaping after the timer counts down can you hope to retain the ill-gotten gains of your run — or even just what you brought in with you in the first place.
Already then, we’re in a genre where a lot of people might be able to decide this game will not be for them. Frustrations can abound; players ambushing exit sites just for the evil fun of it, random internet team-mates running randomly off on their own, stumbling into other teams vastly superior in gear or skill, or the rush of finding a rare item turned instantly to bitter despair on the way out by a sniper’s bullet.
And yet, Marathon has managed to hook me anyway with its immaculate design. In particular, the game’s art style and world-building are massive selling points. In a genre with a lot of gritty grey-brown military blancmange, the bright look of Marathon stands out like a vivid-primary-colour mould-injected-plastic thumb. Running around Tau Ceti feels like boarding a Tupperware Marie Celeste, as you poke around eerie prefab sci-fi workspaces seemingly abandoned mid-shift, nervous that the “flack-flack” noise of pushing past an industrial plastic curtain might alert other players to the fact you’re in the same building.
The AI avatars of the megacorps that send you out to further their commercial interests are all intriguing and cool (OK, maybe the guy who represents the anarchists, who tasks you with things like smashing the colony’s windows, is a little over-the-top), and though the user interface between missions takes a little while to get your bearings with, it’s all in keeping with the retro-futuristic, branding-stamped world. The vibes, as the kids say, are immaculate.
There’s plenty of story to uncover for a multiplayer shooter too. Each of the factions the Runners work for have their own agendas, and completing quests for them or managing to bring back certain items from the Tau Ceti surface tends to reveal more about what happened at the colony. While this might not be a complete mystery to players (see Marathon 1994), it’s presented as one to the characters, and there are some intriguing added wrinkles and details drip-fed through the likes of audio logs, item descriptions and more. The effect is that running around shooting things and stealing stuff from Tau Ceti also feels a bit like participating in sci-fi CSI.
It’s also a typical Bungie product in that running around firing all the future guns feels genuinely great. Moments like plinking away at a freshly arrived wave of robots with your electric assault rifle going tack-tack-tack or teaching another player who didn’t know you were packing a shotgun a lesson about overconfidence can be genuinely thrilling. As well, Marathon turns out to have a whole separate game genre built into it; one of the shell options is the Rook, which bypasses the regular team-based gameplay and drops you into the middle of an ongoing game by yourself with just 10 of the 25 minutes left to run on the clock. This turns the whole game into more of a survival horror experience as you slink around the map to see what you can scrounge, trying hard not to draw the attention of anything or anyone. The gameplay can be an absolute thrill ride
But here’s the rub: Marathon is hard. The Headless Chickens might well have been talking about it when they sang ‘‘The high’s so high, but the low’s so low’’. There’s a brutal Prisoner’s Dilemma. While players are not required to fight one another, and could theoretically team up against the UESC for mutual benefit, they are incentivised to do so by the lure of loot, and (in contrast with some other extraction shooters), a player base-culture of ‘‘shoot on sight’’ has developed. You will load in with all your best gear and die within two minutes at some point. The end game content that is now available, Cryo Archive, a maze on the Marathon itself, also typifies the whole experience by being by all accounts an absolutely thrilling piece of level design — for those very few teams skilled enough to beat it. Have I reached the minimum gear value requirement (almost like an ante) needed just to get in and have a look few times now? Yes. Did it seem very cool in there? Yes. Did I have any idea what was going on? No. How much hope do I have that I will ever manage to escape it? Zero. Marathon not only refuses to hold your hand, but isn’t really keen to be seen in the same room with you.
What we have then is a superbly crafted game that will absolutely not be for everyone, a product that likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars and took years to make while deliberately limiting its own audience. What a fascinating thing. If you don’t bounce off it within half an hour, you may not play a better game this year.
