After months of silence, Bungie fires up the Marathon social media machine to tease… well, something

Remember Marathon? No, not that Marathon, although props for making the throwback connection. I mean the extraction shooter reboot announced in 2023, that we’ve heard practically nothing about since. Well, we may be about to hear more, and possibly quite soon.

After months of silence following a message from game director Joe Ziegler, who reassured the world that work on the game is continuing but otherwise revealed nothing of note, the Marathon social media accounts fired up today to reveal, well, this:

And what exactly is this? I do not know, but it’s attracting a lot of attention. The official Xbox account leapt in, as did Discord, although neither had a whole lot to say. Many Bungie followers also chimed in, most expressing excitement that maybe, finally, we’ll get a proper look at the game, and a few determined to decode what they’re pretty sure is a hidden message and not just 15 seconds of hype.

Assuming the post does mean an imminent update on the status of Marathon, it’s long overdue. The announcement of the reboot was followed by (of course) an ARG, and that was pretty much it for nearly a year, until Bungie announced in March 2024 that Ziegler had taken over as game director.

It later came to light that longtime Bungie employee Christopher Barrett, the original director, had been fired for alleged inappropriate behavior with female employees at the studio. In December 2024, Barrett sued Sony and Bungie over claims of wrongful dismissal, a matter that’s still working its way through the courts.

That dearth of information, not to mention Bungie’s seemingly endless struggles with Destiny 2 and difficulties with Sony, has not inspired great confidence in the Marathon reboot. PC Gamer’s Tim Clark, a man who literally ignored multiple tornado warnings so he could finish a Destiny 2 raid, wrote in 2024 that the catastrophic failure of Concord had him even more worried about Marathon—the obvious implication being that he was worried even before Concord flamed out. As he noted, the world is already filled with extraction shooters, and after taking a bath on Concord, Bungie parent Sony might not be inclined to show too much patience if Marathon doesn’t come out of the gate very strong.

But that all remains to be seen. For now, gamers are just excited about the prospect of seeing something about the game. Fingers crossed it’ll be good.