New Report ‘Marathon’ Raises Questions About Bungie’s Great Adventure

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information from Bungie limited to a trailer, a short video, and an announcement that game director Chris Barrett has been replaced by former Valorant director Joe Ziegler.

Rumors have been swirling around behind the scenes, and I’ll give the latest rumor some credence, since it came from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. On Friends Per Second PodcastSchreier says the sentiment surrounding the marathon is “not great, from what I’ve heard… There’s a reason why it was planned this year and postponed for a whole year.”

“The people I’ve spoken to are a bit pessimistic about hitting the current planned deadline, but we’ll see. I don’t know exactly when that will happen, sometime in 2025, I’m not sure.”

There was a buzz a while back about a playtest that was said to have gone poorly, and it was reported by Destiny content creators like Aztecross who later deleted a video covering the subject because the source and context didn’t seem good enough to broadcast. I know there have been more playtests since then, but I haven’t heard anything leaked from them.

As I talked to current and former Bungie employees about the layoffs and everything surrounding them, I heard surprisingly little about Marathon itself. Instead, several people commented on Gummi Bears, the new MOBA/fighting game that just entered SIE with a new studio and a few dozen Bungie developers. It’s supposed to be a lot of fun.

The complete silence around Marathon for over a year was a bit strange. The six-minute video aired in May 2023, featuring then-director Chris Barrett, who left the project for unclear reasons a month or so later. We didn’t know Ziegler had replaced him until reports broke about nine months later, and 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 the release date nears. No further information has been shared since then, and Ziegler has not tweeted since that day.

Behind the scenes reports before this By Rebecca Valentine of IGNThis suggests that Marathon has shifted from custom player characters to a champion-like roster under Valorant’s Ziegler. This has been a huge disappointment to existing Destiny players without more information to expand on exactly how this will work. But the narrative all along has been that this game may not be for Destiny players in the first place. Bungie also doesn’t want to cannibalize its core game, and its main goal is to attract younger players and carve out a niche in the hard-to-penetrate multiplayer space.

I’d also be surprised if Marathon fully launches in 2025. While I’d certainly expect some beta or demo releases around that time, I don’t know anything about that timeline given the massive upheaval at Bungie and how little we’ve seen of it. But then again, Bungie’s leadership is telling its remaining workers that Marathon is do-or-die for the company. The same thing they said about The Final Shape before this, and despite how well-received it was, hundreds of layoffs followed.

I don’t think there’s enough information about Marathon to make any definitive judgments about its status, but part of that is certainly because Bungie hasn’t shown anything official about the game for 15 months now.

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