Over the weekend, Bungie hosted a substantial reveal showcase for its next game, a first-person team-based extraction shooter called Marathon. The showcase was about three (yes, three) hours long and featured not one but two gameplay trailers, an incredible cinematic vignette, the announcement of a closed alpha, and the game’s release date. Here is everything you need to know:
For starters, Marathon is launching on September 23rd, 2025 for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S, and can be wishlisted now across storefronts. We won’t have to wait that long to get our hands on the game though, as a closed alpha test is scheduled to run from April 23rd through May 4th. If you’re interested, you can sign-up for the alpha through the official Discord by sending a message reading “/alpha” to any of the channels within – official instructions will follow. The closed alpha will be limited to North America and to players older than 18. Bungie says this first test will be limited, but they’re already teasing the beta, so don’t fret.
Now let’s get down to brass tax – the gameplay. My word, it’s glorious. And we didn’t just get a quick-and-dirty gameplay trailer (we did), but we also got a gameplay overview trailer that does a nice job of summarizing what Marathon’s moment-to-moment gameplay is like. Runner classes, weapons, abilities, equipment, dynamic weather, narrative lore, in-game community events, and so much more is touched on in this video.
Okay, okay, you’re like, “show me the raw gameplay”. Well, Bungie showed some of that too from a recent event with press and content creators, which you can also see below. It’s been chopped up, of course, but not nearly as much as the trailers, so you can get a better sense of how the game plays in the wild.
And last, but certainly not least, is a cinematic short vignette, which was a collaboration between Bungie and director Alberto Mielgo, who has directed for Netflix show Love, Death & Robots. While I loved seeing all that gameplay, I was absolutely stunned by this new short film. Bungie admitted that storytelling in multiplayer games is a heavy lift, but that they’re staying the course to build a world and tell stories in Marathon that are compelling. In fact, they’ve been playing into this world-building for weeks now with an ongoing alternate reality game that culminated in this big reveal.
That was a lot to digest, and yet there is still so much we don’t know, namely the price, since they did say this would be a premium game. But we also need to know more about battle passes and post-launch content, in addition to price – my guess is $40 or $50. See you on Tau Ceti IV fellow Runners.
