New “Marathon” report raises questions about Bungie’s big gamble

We still know very little about Marathon. All the information Bungie has to offer is a trailer, a short vidoc, and the announcement that Game Director Chris Barrett has been replaced by former Valorant Director Joe Ziegler.

Behind the scenes, rumors have been flying all over the place, and I give the latest one at least some credence, coming from the ever-reliable Jason Schreier of Bloomberg. On the Friends Per Second podcast, Schreier says the sentiment surrounding the marathon “is not great from what I’ve heard… There’s a reason it was scheduled for this year and got pushed back a whole year.”

“The people I’ve spoken to are a bit pessimistic about whether the currently planned date will even be met, but we’ll see. I don’t know exactly when that will be, sometime in 2025, I’m not sure.”

There was a controversy a while back where a playtest supposedly didn’t go well. This was reported by Destiny content creators like Aztecross, who later deleted a video on the subject because the sources and context didn’t seem good enough to publish. I know there have been more playtests since then, but I haven’t heard any of this leaked.

While I’ve spoken to current and former Bungie employees about the layoff situation and everything related to it, I’ve heard surprisingly little about Marathon itself. Instead, several people have made comments about Gummi Bears, the new MOBA/fighting game that was just brought to SIE by a new studio and a few dozen Bungie developers. It’s supposed to be very entertaining.

The complete silence surrounding Marathon for over a year was a bit odd. The six-minute vidoc aired in May 2023 and had a lot to do with then-director Chris Barrett, who left the project about a month later for unclear reasons. We didn’t learn that Ziegler had replaced him until reports came out about nine months later and then it was officially announced. Ziegler tweeted on March 19, 2024 that he was the new game director and that he was “excited to share more information about the game” as release got closer. No further information has been shared since then and Ziegler hasn’t tweeted since that day.

Behind-the-scenes reports, previously mostly from Schreier, suggest that Marathon has moved from custom player characters to a hero-like roster under Valorant’s Ziegler. This has been a major turn-off for current Destiny players, as there’s no further information on how exactly this works. But all along, the narrative has been that this game is probably not for Destiny players at all. Bungie doesn’t want to cannibalize its bread-and-butter game either, and their main goal is to attract younger players and secure a spot in the hard-to-get-to multiplayer space.

I, too, would be surprised if Marathon were to fully release in 2025. While I would certainly expect some alpha or beta releases during that time, given the enormous turmoil at Bungie and the little we’ve seen of it so far, I just don’t know about that timeline. But once again, Bungie leadership is telling their remaining employees that Marathon is vital to the company. They said the same thing before about The Final Shape, and while that was so well received, hundreds of layoffs followed.

I don’t think there’s enough concrete information about Marathon to make an informed assessment of its condition, but that’s probably partly because Bungie hasn’t released anything official about the game in 15 months.

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