Does Bungie's new Marathon game have competitive potential?

Here is everything you need to know about the new Bungie Marathon game and how its development is coming along.

What is the Marathon game? Explained

Bungie's 2025 Marathon game is an upcoming entry in the Halo developer studio's classic science fiction first person shooter franchise, which dates back all the way to 1994. The original Marathon Bungie trilogy is such an ancient classic that the games were, in fact, originally only released on the Classic Mac OS, with Windows ports only coming years after the fact.

Here are the three original Marathon games and their release dates:

• Marathon (December 21, 1994)
• Marathon 2: Durandal (November 24, 1995)
• Marathon Infinity (October 15, 1996)

The Marathon game series name is taken from the massive ship that serves as the setting of the original game. It brought along many groundbreaking innovations at the time, such as allowing you to use mouselook to freely look around in the game world rather than only being able to adjust your view perspective with the keyboard.

The franchise is a predecessor of Halo in more ways than one – not just in tone and sci-fi setting – and Bungie continues to sprinkle references to the game and its graphics in their other titles all the way to this day.

If you are interested in learning more about the original Marathon Bungie games and how you can play them well on a modern computer, here is a fantastic video review for you to check out:

That said, with Halo becoming such a massive gaming franchise, it makes sense that it has not been viable for Bungie to revisit Marathon for a very long time. But now, after a string of failures and commercial concerns swerving around the studio – which is, lest we forget, now under the auspices of Sony rather than an independent developer team, as they have been between 2007 and 2022, having been bought for an absolutely eye-popping $3.6 billion sum. So the pressures are great, and it is easy to understand how and why they ended up with the decision to revisit an old classic of their portfolio and reimagine it as a live service multiplayer affair.

It is an intriguing project in more ways than one: not only is it Bungie's first new game in a decade – having been busy managing their live service titles – but it is also their first foray into a new FPS subgenre.

This new Marathon game was first announced in May 2023 as an extraction shooter. It will be available on all major gaming platforms – PC, PS5, the Xbox Series X/S – with crossplay and cross-save available from the very beginning. Its Steam page features the tags of "Extraction Shooter," "Shooter," "PvP," and "Multiplayer," and its topline description reads as such:

"Scavenge the lost colony of Tau Ceti IV in Bungie's team-based extraction shooter. Choose your Runner, cybernetic mercenaries with unique abilities, as you battle rival teams & security forces for weapons & upgrades. Fill your vault, take on high-stakes challenges, & unravel the colony's mysteries."

The gameplay reveal trailer crossed over one million views and gave many tantalizing tidbits for fans to consider about the game and the lore:

Having considered all that, it is important to know that the Marathon game is entering a challenging market in its genre, and it is hot off the heels of a high-profile failure: Sony has previously been responsible for publishing Concorde, which was one of the biggest duds of all time in the live service shooter scene. That game was in development for eight years and debuted to shockingly low sales, prompting the publisher to outright shut the game down in just two weeks and refund people who bought it. Unsurprisingly, Firewalk Studios, who were responsible for developing the game, were also shuttered.

It is safe to say that Bungie does not quite have this much riding on the success of Marathon, but it is still very important for the studio and its owners to get it right, with reports suggesting it is a "make-or-break" launch to get the new Marathon game out. And targeting the lucrative and long-term possibilities of a live service experience – especially with a competitive component and an esports aspect – can be the way to go.

So, how are these elements looking so far?

Is Marathon going to be a new esport?

Since the game is still under development, we cannot really tell how it will look like once the 1.0 version rolls around, and how quickly and consistently the game will continue to be updated from that point after. (Let us remember that alongside Marathon, óBungie is also still responsible for managing Destiny 2 and various Halo properties in the meantime.) Based on the feedback from the closed alpha, it is clear that the gameplay was still far away from where it needs to be to establish the new Marathon game as a title with a robust professional scene.

From a PR perspective, the fact that the closed alpha was initially behind a robust NDA – basically meaning that the participating players and influencers would not have been allowed to share any meaningful details about it with the general public – was not a good sign. Nowadays, these tests are just as much about generating hype and interest rather than actually testing and developing the game. Facing community backlash, Bungie loosened these provisions, but what followed has shown quite precisely why they might not have wanted to get all the possible eyeballs on the game just yet.

Reviews for the Marathon game's closed alpha started popping up in late April, and most of them were scathing. The test version launched with super-strong aim assist (no doubt with the goal of helping console players keep up with their PC counterparts), and while this has been part and parcel of certain shooters over the past decade, it was so critically overcooked in Marathon Bungie removed it outright halfway through the testing process.

Unlike most traditional extraction shooters, Marathon from Bungie focuses on first-person gunplay and with a greater emphasis on direct action rather than tactics. In many ways, the hero-based component feels like an afterthought, possibly influenced by the pickup of a bigwig who had a great influence on VALORANT. In general, the great challenge of the game is to introduce regular FPS players to the extraction shooter subgenre, and for now, it seems like that is a tough proposition, especially based on how the solo player experience is reportedly terrible. To quote a Kotaku review, "The alpha feels too watered-down to attract the extraction sickos who have 2000 hours in Tarkov. But it still feels like it's going to be too punishing to attract casual Destiny players and battle royale fans. I saw someone, can't remember who, tweet that the game is like Apex Legends: But Now You Lose Everything When You Die Edition and that's not completely fair, but not that far off either."

This would, of course, not be a consideration in competitive play since if Marathon Bungie were to become a notable esport, all high-stakes matches would be played out between teams with established lineups and strong synergies. Ultimately, it is still up in the air just what kind of players Bungie and Sony are looking to target with the game – but the more they move towards the hardcore direction (again, think Tarkov), the more likely is for the game to have at least a small but super dedicated competitive scene that sticks around long after the launch period. And the developer and publisher are definitely large enough to support a competitive scene, as they have done in the past for their other titles, too.

We will definitely know more by the time the open beta rolls around, which was rumored to be scheduled for August, a month or so before the game is set to launch. However, the date is not set in stone, and no specific announcement has been made.

Marathon game plagiarism controversy – what the heck happened there?

While there have been many concerns and criticisms about how the closed alpha of the Marathon game played, the biggest controversy to date about the new Marathon from Bungie has to do with a seemingly confirmed case of plagiarism, or art theft, that has sullied excitement about the game in a great way and forced the developers to rapidly backtrack.

Here is what we know about this matter as of the summer of 2025:

On May 15, digital artist Fern Hook aka ANTIREAL posted comparison images on Bluesky showcasing damning similarities between her 2017 poster designs and some visual signifiers of the Marathon game's alpha build.

"Bungie is [of course] not obligated to hire me when making a game that draws overwhelmingly from the same design language I have refined for the last decade, but clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution," she wrote, adding, "I don't have the resources nor the energy to spare to pursue this legally but I have lost count of the number of times a major company has deemed it easier to pay a designer to imitate or steal my work than to write me an email" and that "in 10 years I have never made a consistent income from this work and I am tired of designers from huge companies moodboarding and parasitising my designs while i struggle to make a living."

Per reporting from Esports Insider, Bungie copped to the issue soon after, writing that a former designer did indeed crib some of these graphics very early in development. Joseph Cross, the Marathon game's art director, later wrote that "An artist who worked on Marathon took elements from a graphic designer without permission or acknowledgement and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in in 2020. It included icons and elements that ended up in our alpha build and there's absolutely no excuse for this oversight and we are working on our review process to ensure incidents like this don't happen again. We've reached out to ANTIREAL and followed up to ensure we're doing right by this artist and we're committed to removing anything that is questionably or inappropriately sourced." It seems the issue has triggered an internal audit from Sony and forced Bungie to hold back any footage in their next livestream as all assets were being reviewed.

How or what exactly the parties agreed upon in terms of compensation, if any, never came to light for the general public. However, what is known that this is unfortunately not the first time Bungie found itself in hot water for plagiarism issues, with multiple cases of Destiny fan art (or something very close) ending up in gameplay trailers over the years – you can find more details here if you are interested.

Is the 2025 Marathon game delayed or cancelled?

After the closed alpha's poor reception, and the controversies that have followed in its wake, many people have expected Sony to delay the release of Marathon by Bungie, and at the time of writing, it was finally confirmed that the game’s launch will be postponed from the initially planned date of September 23, with no confirmation of when the game will ultimately reach 1.0 status.

The Marathon Bungie blog post update detailed the reasons behind this decision (which match what we have discussed above) and highlighted many specific focus points for the development process, which are the following:

• More challenging and engaging AI encounters
• More rewarding runs, with new types of loot and dynamic events
• Making combat more tense and strategic
• Increased visual fidelity
• More narrative and environmental storytelling to discover and interact with
• A darker tone that delivers on the themes of the original trilogy
• A better player experience for solo/duos
• Prox chat, so social stories can come to life

It has already been quite eye-opening that a recent developer discussion livestream made no mention of the open beta, but it did reveal some interesting details that suggest that, at least for now, Bungie and Sony are in this for the long haul.

Here are some of the most interesting excerpts from the Marathon Bungie stream on May 16, courtesy of this Reddit writeup, which match well with what has now been revealed about the upcoming development steps and decisions:

"We have plans for a lot of alien stuff coming in the future that we don't want to talk about yet."

"If you start at full volume, you know, there's kind of no place to go. You're going to hit the ceiling pretty fast, but that doesn't mean we're not invested in those areas. Ultimately, we're at the start of a journey that we hope Marathon is taking towards and eventually telling a much bigger story."

"A bunch of work is going into increasing the resurrection time, and also having it so that every time you go down, the timer does get increased. And so if you keep on going down, your ability to come back from the abyss is harder and harder."

"There were a few work-in-progress areas that got a lot of scrutiny in the Alpha build, such as like exterior lighting on the Perimeter map, and our art team is full steam ahead on a bunch of those improvements."

"We've even added details that have helped to make it a little bit more immersive, like blood. Runners bleed even in water, and will create trails as indicators of damage that they've taken."

"Proximity chat is one of the areas that we're still brainstorming around, you know."

It is quite clear that there are still many moving parts when it comes to the final Marathon gameplay experience, but the pedigree of the studio and the development team behind it, coupled with the IP of a classic franchise and the exciting goal of making a shooter subgenre a more widely accessible experience – and also a competitive esport – makes this a project that is definitely worth closely following for gaming fans all around the world.