New ‘Marathon’ Report Raises Questions About Bungie’s Risky Gamble

We still know very little about Marathon, with all the information from Bungie limited to a trailer, a brief Vidoc, and an announcement that game director Chris Barrett had been replaced by former Valorant director Joe Ziegler.

The behind-the-scenes rumors are flying, and I can only give some credence to the latest one, since it comes from Bloomberg’s very reliable Jason Schreier. On the Friends Per Second podcast, Schreier says that sentiment around Marathon is “not great, from what I’ve heard… There’s a reason it was scheduled for this year and was pushed back a whole year.”

“People I’ve spoken to are a little pessimistic about the project being delivered on schedule, but we’ll see. I don’t know exactly when that will happen, but it will be 2025, I’m not sure.”

There was a row a while back about a playtest that didn’t go well, and it was reported by Destiny content creators like Aztecross who then deleted a video covering the topic because the source and context didn’t seem good enough to be released. I know there have been other playtests since then, but I haven’t heard anything leaked about it.

While I’ve been talking to current and former Bungie employees about the layoff situation and everything surrounding it, I’ve heard surprisingly little about Marathon itself. Instead, several people have been commenting on Gummi Bears, the new MOBA/fighting game that just launched on SIE from a new studio and a few dozen Bungie developers. It’s supposed to be a lot of fun.

The complete silence surrounding Marathon for over a year has been a bit strange. The six-minute Vidoc was released in May 2023, and largely featured then-director Chris Barrett, who then left the project for unclear reasons about a month later. We didn’t learn that Ziegler had replaced him until news broke about nine months later, and he was officially announced. Ziegler tweeted on March 19, 2024 that he was the game’s new director and that he was “excited to share more information about the game” as release approached. No further information has been shared since then, and Ziegler hasn’t tweeted since that day.

Behind-the-scenes information released before this by IGN’s Rebekah Valentine indicates that Marathon has transitioned from custom player characters to a roster of heroes under the leadership of Valorant’s Ziegler. This has been a huge turnoff for existing Destiny players without more information to explain how exactly it works. But the narrative all along has been that this game probably isn’t for Destiny players in the first place. Bungie also doesn’t want to cannibalize its base game, and its main goal is to attract younger players and carve out a niche for itself in the hard-to-break-in multiplayer space.

I too would be surprised if Marathon were to be fully released in 2025. While I certainly expect a few alphas or betas around that time, I don’t know what the timeline will be given the massive turmoil at Bungie and how little we’ve seen of it. But once again, Bungie management is telling its remaining employees that Marathon is a matter of life and death for the company. The same thing they said about The Final Shape before that, and despite the positive reception it received, hundreds of layoffs followed.

I don’t think there’s enough concrete information on Marathon to make a solid judgment on its state, but part of that is probably due to the fact that Bungie hasn’t shown anything official about the game in 15 months now.

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