Bungie's Marathon ARG is gorgeous, extensive, and how the hell do people work this stuff out anyway
The announcement of a new Marathon by Bungie is one of those moments you can't quite believe. I've been a Bungie fan for a long time and in the early 2000s in particular was a frequenter of the studio's homepage, always an amazing place and at the time the motherlode for everything Halo. As well as the humour, and the constant ARGs / teases (anyone remember ilovebees.com?), there was an occasional running gag about Marathon coming back or being the studio's next project: Because it just seemed so unlikely.
This new Marathon is obviously going to be very different to the originals, but Bungie itself… it's still Bungie, still teasing, still having fun with all us silly meatbags who just love their stuff and cannot get enough about whatever they're doing. The announcement came alongside various official accounts, and following breadcrumb trails (such as which accounts the Marathon account was following on Twitter) leads to more breadcrumbs and, eventually, the odd slice of lovely bread. Luckily, we can all just sit back and wait for internet sleuths to do the hard work.
The first fruits of fan investigation are a behind-the-scenes documentary where Bungie staff discuss the high-level concepts for the game and show off a lot of the superb artwork. The studio is clearly proud of the Marathon aesthetic and it should be: this game looks like the absolute business.
The new Marathon is PvP-focused, with no single player campaign, and an extraction shooter. You play a runner, some sort of very cool bio-augmented shooty person who goes into dangerous places, blasts away, and re-emerges with shiny loot. The game's set on a planet called Tau Ceti IV and the idea is that players are uncovering the story as Marathon's seasons unfold:
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