Bungie’s Marathon is autobiography. In 2022, Sony bought the developer behind Halo, Marathon, and Destiny as part of a larger movement into live-service gaming. Despite the success of 2024’s Helldivers 2, that effort has largely crashed and burned, claiming the likes of an online title set in the world of The Last Of Us, another in the God Of War series, a cancelled project at Sony’s Bend studio, Concord and the entire development team behind it, and, most recently, one of the publisher’s greatest assets, the accomplished remake studio Bluepoint Games. And now Bungie has released Marathon, a game about expendable mercenaries hired by uncaring corporations to scavenge what value they can from a failed project.
In Marathon, every player is a shell, an “unregistered biocybernetic entity” built to work outside the jurisdiction of spacetime law and “disqualified from human rights and wartime cruelty protection.” These shells harbor the consciousness of humans—freelance mercenaries known as runners—and diligently do the risky work of descending onto Tau Ceti IV, where a now-abandoned colony was meant to support humanity’s growth across the cosmos. In other words, these runners and their shells are a means to an end, weapons to be wielded by Marathon‘s various factions and corporations to extract anything and everything that they might salvage from Tau Ceti IV (be it arms, left-behind valuables, or samples of life) and the seemingly failed Marathon project that once sought to colonize the system.
Marathon itself is a finely tuned weapon—the extraction shooter (a niche genre about looting a map for the most prized possessions, surviving against other threats and players, and successfully exfiltrating with your bounty) that has finally made the genre’s prickly design principles click. Bungie’s signature polished gameplay lends a sheen to the genre that makes participating in its loop more exacting and precise than other games of this type, and also less susceptible to crude exploits and bugs. The studio’s ineffable pedigree for the fundamentals of the first-person shooter, from the audio-visual feedback of clipping an AI combatant to the tremendously propulsive whir of a powerslide in the Vandal shell, is as evident here as on Halo and Destiny, enriching the tense loop of successive runs. Each shell, complete with their own abilities and specialties, allows the player to chart a new course every run with a simple choice, and every one of its maps offers a varied sandbox in which to luxuriate. At a time when games feel increasingly generic and impersonal, these details show that Marathon is made by actual people with an eye and ear for what makes games special.
What is this finely crafted weapon pointed at, though? And to what ends? These are the questions that one can’t help but ask in light of the decay surrounding Marathon, its developer, publisher, and the games industry at large. Mere days into Marathon‘s lifespan, Highguard, another live-service game with lofty ambitions and a studio filled to the brim with accomplished developers, was shut down after a meager 45 days of operation. Concord, a game actually published by Sony, was taken down within two weeks of its launch. Almost every week brings news of studio closures, layoffs, cancellations, and the shutterings of online games. Failure and doom stalk products of the live-service bubble, and it has only gotten harder, not easier, to strike success in ventures like it.
If any studio could succeed where so many others have failed and make a new shooter that people want to play indefinitely, you’d think it’d be Bungie. But Bungie’s own previous live-service efforts have ebbed. Despite its historic success, layoffs eventually struck the developer in 2023, impacting Destiny 2 and the then-freshly announced multiplayer-only revival of Marathon. Destiny‘s tumultuous, decade-long story appeared to culminate in The Final Shape, an expansion that sought to pay off years of storytelling and which was released to critical acclaim in June 2024. Then, mere months after its release, Bungie suffered a second, and even more devastating, round of layoffs, casting a long shadow over both projects. And yet the live-service churn continued to extract all possible resources from both games. Roadmaps for Destiny were made (and subsequently compromised) and Marathon was delayed and refined after a particularly rough alpha test.
Despite those refinements, Marathon is still inextricably a live-service game like Destiny 2 before it. Time and a chilly reception were never going to change this aspect of Marathon. Upon booting the game up, alongside a menu littered with quests handed down by various factions, and teases of mysteries that might be answered in subsequent seasons, you’ll be greeted by the sight of a season pass—a paltry one with scant offerings and little incentive to buy in—as well as an in-game store. Though Bungie’s penchant for substantive stylistic choices has never been more apparent than Marathon‘s melding of fonts and tech and streetwear inspired fashion, the bundles available to buy at launch provide little of interest. This all comes together in one shape that’s unmistakable to anybody familiar with live-service games: the content treadmill. Live-service games are primarily interested in helping themselves to the wallets of their customers—just last week Epic Games announced it was increasing the cost of Fortnite microtransactions to “help pay the bills” of what is already one of the most successful games of all time—and this ongoing marathon of new content drives that.
It remains to be seen if Marathon can keep up with that treadmill while overcoming the disillusionment and even outright hostility many feel toward live-service games. But making shooters people want to play is the kind of thing Bungie excels at, from the signature set pieces and genre-defining action of Halo, to the way Destiny recast it in a multiplayer mold. Bungie has defied failure time and time again, and seeing what this team does with its back against the wall has become one of the most interesting things about Marathon.
Still, it’s increasingly cruel to point a team toward such a grisly fate, especially one as accomplished in this field as Bungie—even if that past accomplishment makes them more likely to succeed. It’s a major risk with long odds that might pay off massively for Sony, but that also puts Bungie, a prized weapon in Sony’s war chest, in extreme danger. Of course Bungie is a shell. Of course Marathon is autobiography, whether intentionally or not. In Marathon, as in other extraction shooters, any run that isn’t completed successfully ends with everything being lost; it’s all too possible Bungie could see the same fate. Thus far Bungie has not been fully razed by the ruinous perils of corporate consolidation. Its own resources have not been fully extracted. It’s still on a run, but it’s clearly a shell—a pawn in grander, riskier machinations.