Bungie are gearing up to reveal something about Marathon

Bungie have broken a silence surrounding their upcoming extraction shooter Marathon to tweet a short video full of cryptic symbols. It’s proven hard for fans to decrypt so far, but the developers have since followed up with a few more teasey posts, including one that certainly reads like a notice to fans that more information on the game will be revealed soon. “The signal is coming. The truth is coming,” says a line of plain text in the marketing spritz. “Are you ready?”

The first post on Xitter to send fans into a flap was that spliced video of various symbols swishing around. Some users think you have to cut up the video and piece it back together correctly before attempting to decode the symbols’ meanings. But most of the Xitterati just immediately gave up and asked the social media’s built-in AI Grok what the video meant. Grok didn’t know. It said the post was marketing.

Afterwards, the studio’s social media account shared more. It posted an animation showing a code being slowly decrypted, while warning of an “unauthorized transmission”. Alongside this was a link to an ARG website with a Twitch login. Currently the Twitch login just brings you to a page saying “Access Denied”. It all basically looks like a fancy and playful way of saying “broadcast incoming”, but who knows.

Finally, the most recent post shows another animated image, depicting a snake with a written message alongside. “The signal bleeds through their jamming,” it reads. “Symbols not random. Not accident. Not noise. But VOICE.” It compels the reader to “decrypt decrypt decrypt” and ends with a final hypey warning. “The signal is coming. The truth is coming. Are you ready? RISE RISE RISE.”

Bungie have been fond of these ARG marketing tactics since the days of Halo 2. The last concrete news we got of Marathon was in a brief video from game director Joe Ziegler in which he reassured everyone that the game was still alive. That was in October last year. He didn’t share much about the actual game itself, however, beyond brief mentions of two playable character classes, one referred to as “stealth” and the other as “thief”.

Marathon has had a troubled development so far. The company laid off hundreds of people last year, doubtless impacting the game’s production. And director Christopher Barrett was taken off the project after allegations of “predatory behaviour” towards several women working at the studio. Marathon will be the studio’s first release since being bought by Sony in 2022, and Sony have been somewhat ruthless towards the makers of live service games lately. The stakes feel quite high.

As someone who enjoys the feel of Bungie’s shooters (and who still counts the original Marathon trilogy as good FPS games) I’m interested to see how this reboot might play with the extraction shooter genre. But I’m also, like others, dead tired of live service games. I think I just preferred Bungie when they made Halo. Anyway, we’ll keep an eye out for more news on the feeds – both the real ones, and the ones that shout RISE at you a lot.