I know you didn’t hear about Marathon, that remake Bungie is making of its game of the same name, in a minute. Well, no more, as the studio came out with a long ass, over-20-minute video documentary outlining new stuff regarding its development process.
But the two tidbits of the video (which you can see below) are these: the game will come out in the first three months of 2026, with March being its maximum deadline bar any unforeseen hurdles.
And the other one — and this might pique your interest — is that it’ll come out cheaper than your average new AAA release, costing about $40 as soon as it hits the shelves.
The Marathon remake will be the first new entry of an entire franchise in 30 years
Despite not as well known as some other Bungie franchises, such as Destiny, its sequel or, even more so, Halo, Marathon is actually a well established trilogy in its own right: the original game came out in 1994, followed up by Marathon: Durandal and Marathon: Infinity, in 1995 and 1996, respectively.
That means this is the first entry of the franchise in three decades, considering the remake, which was announced in 2023, will come out next year.
According to all info available, this Marathon will follow most of the original’s concept, being a first-person multiplayer extraction shooter set on the planet Tau Ceti IV in the year 2893. In this reality, human colonists from the UESC Marathon, a ship constructed out of the Martian moon Deimos, have started a new colony.
A strange event has caused the disappearance of the majority of colonists, however, and the remaining survivors have formed factions to scavenge the colony for supplies. These factions have hired “Runners”, humans who have given up their body in favor of specialized cybernetic ones, to infiltrate the colony, fight against both rival Runners and alien forces on the planet, and retrieve valuable artifacts, data, and resources.
Despite being a known project from at least three years ago, this remake had a major hurdle to overcome, in the form of a plagiarism lawsuit: in May 2023, digital artist Fern “Antireal” Hook claimed the game was using, without authorization, some of his own designs. Although suspicion arose over two years ago, Antireal decided to wait before speaking out as, earlier this year, a closed alpha test was made available, and he was able to review actual footage and confirm his suspicions.
Bungie did not deny the problem, claiming a former dev that was no longer involved in the Marathon project had used the problematic assets without the studio’s knowledge. The situation was seemingly solved earlier this month.
Marathon is set to be released for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S.
