Bungie has released a new video documentary about Marathon, its newly announced sci-fi PvP extraction shooter.
Announced yesterday at the PlayStation Showcase, the new Marathon is the first entry in the franchise since 1996. The game is PvP-focused and will not have a single-player campaign, but will honor the mythology and history of the original Marathon games.
We’ve already learned even more details about the upcoming shooter, thanks to a six-and-a-half-minute video Bungie released after fans quickly solved one of the developer’s famous ARG (alternate reality game) puzzles.
Now moving on to the scavenger hunt that Bungie fans did yesterday to uncover the ViDoc, but first let’s get to the content of the video itself.
In Marathon, you play as a runner and explore the hostile world of Tau Ceti IV while searching for artifacts and weapons. Bungie showed off concept art for the Runners, describing them as a combination of fashion, sci-fi, and cyberpunk.
Bungie says players will be part of Marathon’s story as it unfolds over the course of a season. For example, an extraction team could find an alien key that unlocks a new zone. The responsibility then rests with those players to figure out how to unlock the zone for everyone else.
Marathon will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC and features full crossplay and cross-progression. No release date was given, but Bungie said it’s headed for Alpha. The team plans to stay in the dark for a while to work on the game and says we’ll see the gameplay next time Marathon comes out.
Bungie fans follow a trail of breadcrumbs to unlock the Marathon ViDoc
It turns out Bungie hid a ton of secrets in yesterday’s reveal trailer, including a mystery that saw Bungie developers posting cryptic images on social media. As the community tracked down and overlaid all 12 secret images, a series of dots emerged.
Thanks to some leads from a well-hidden Marathon Twitter account, the community discovered that it was a binary sequence that had to be passed through a punch card decoder. This led the puzzle solvers to a stream that took 7,777 viewers to unlock the full ViDoc. Destiny YouTuber Skarrow9 solved the last step of the puzzle last night and posted a video that fully explains the solution.
I SOLVED THE @MarathonTheGame ARG CODE GO [email protected]_Are_Mida
EVERYBODY IN THIS VIDEO NOW TO UNLOCK THE NEXT STEP!!!!
— Skarrow9 (@Skarrow9) May 25, 2023
There are even more secrets hidden in the Marathon reveal trailer. In fact, Skarrow9 shared a Google doc that chronicles all the secrets that Bungie fans are working to uncover. In less than 24 hours since the reveal, the Marathon community has already put in a lot of work as this document spans 37 pages of clues and insights.
Unsolved mysteries include deciphering the pages of a marathon zine, figuring out order and memo documents, and more.
Bungie is known for teasing fans with these scavenger hunts and over the years digging a series of deep, winding rabbit holes for Destiny fans to explore. The developer’s ARG history dates back to the Halo days when they promoted Halo 2 on a website called ilovebees.com.
See each announcement from yesterday’s PlayStation Showcase 2023 for more information.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN, covering video game and entertainment news. He has over seven years of gaming industry experience as a contributor to IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
