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Development has been its own marathon

The first new Marathon game in decades will launch on March 5

Development hasn’t exactly been smooth since the extraction shooter’s 2023 announcement.

Kyle Orland – | 179
*Beatles voice* Bang bang shoot shoot. Credit: Bungie
*Beatles voice* Bang bang shoot shoot. Credit: Bungie
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It has been nearly three years now since Destiny maker (and Sony subsidiary) Bungie formally announced a revival of the storied Marathon FPS franchise. And it has been about seven months since the game’s originally announced release date of September 23, 2025, was pushed back indefinitely after a reportedly poor response to the game’s first Alpha test.

But today, in a post on the PlayStation Blog, Bungie revealed that the new Marathon would finally be hitting PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X|S on March 5, narrowing down the monthlong March release window announced back in December.

Today’s preorder trailer revealing the Marathon release date.

Unlike Destiny 2, which transitioned to a free-to-play model in 2019, the new Marathon sells a Standard Edition for $40 or a $60 Deluxe Edition that includes some digital rewards and cosmetics. That mirrors the pricing of the somewhat similar Arc Raiders, which recently hit 12 million sales in less than 12 weeks.

A new kind of Marathon

Unlike the original Marathon trilogy on the ’90s Macintosh—which closely followed on the single-player campaign corridors and deathmatch multiplayer of the original Doom—the new Marathon is described as a “PvPvE survival extraction shooter.” That means gameplay based around exploring distinct zones and scavenging for cosmetics and gear upgrades in exploratory missions alone or with up to two friends, then seeing those missions “break into fast-paced PvP combat” at a moment’s notice, according to the game’s official description.

A new preorder trailer expands on other more gameplay-focused videos showcasing the poisoned world of Tau Ceti IV and the six competing factions of highly customizable “runner shells” they’ll inhabit. Bungie has also revealed a scavenging-focused “Rook” option for players who want to queue up solo and join a match in progress with nothing but a starting kit.

“Instead of focusing on progression and questing and things of that sort, [Rook] is a mode where we make it easy for you to just kind of drop into a match that’s in progress and run about and try to scavenge as much as possible and get out with it, so that you can populate your vault a little bit more for future runs,” Game Director Joe Ziegler said in a recent video.

A gameplay-revealed trailer from last year.

The Marathon revival project has faced its fair share of development troubles in recent years. That includes public accusations that early test gameplay included plagiarized artwork, leading the development team to announce a “thorough review of our in-game assets.” Internal plans to release the game in 2024 were reportedly pushed back an entire year amid pessimism among developers. More recently, the game got a new creative director in June, which isn’t exactly a sign of confidence that late in a long-running project.

After all that—and given a Bungie gaming pedigree that dates back to the original Marathon—it’s fair to say that the new Marathon is going to get more than its fair share of attention when it finally gets into players’ hands in just six weeks.

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Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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