When I went to Bellevue, Washington, in early April to visit Bungie’s headquarters and take a gander at Marathon, the studio’s upcoming extraction shooter, I remembered the first time I played a PC copy of Halo as a teen. Despite logging hundreds of hours on Xbox before, I was terrible with my mouse and keyboard until a patient stranger spent hours guiding me to victory. I had another guide with Marathon, but it wasn’t a random username hundreds or thousands of miles away via the internet — it was Kevin Yanes, a former Destiny developer who is now the Runner gameplay lead for Marathon.
And it was in my victory alongside Yanes — and our eventual defeat — that I started to believe that with Marathon, Bungie might actually pull off the three-peat by bringing yet another genre to the masses.
The way Marathon works will be familiar to you if you’re already an extraction shooter sicko and have played games like Escape From Tarkov. But even if that’s not you, the game will still be mostly familiar if you’ve played a battle royale game like Fortnite or Apex Legends. What sets games like Tarkov and now Marathon apart from the battle royale genre — which involve a large group of players getting dropped onto a map where they loot items and try to be the last to survive — is that the loot can leave the match with you. The goal of Marathon isn’t to be the last player in the lobby; it’s to find cool shit (either hidden in a chest or stolen from other players), and then extract safely with said cool shit in tow.
Each game of Marathon begins with you selecting the Runner you’d like to play. These Runners are essentially heroes — each one has a distinct look, a couple of specific abilities, and a fistful of passive effects. You’ll then set your loadout by pulling items from past runs into your inventory, like increased shields, higher-rarity weapons, and perk nodes. Or, if you’re just starting out and don’t have any items or currency yet, you can launch in with a sponsored pack, which is a free or cheap (in terms of credits, the in-game currency) loadout that comes with low-quality versions of everything you need.
When you’re ready, you’ll group up (or matchmake) with two other players and head into the map of your choosing — of which there are several, each with varying difficulty levels and player caps. While Bungie did tell us that you can turn off squad-fill matchmaking and jump into a round as a solo or duo player, you’ll be at a distinct disadvantage.
Image: Bungie
You’ll load into a map with varying numbers of opponents, with the count depending on the map size. Dire Marsh, the map we played on for most of my preview, can hold 18 players — six squads of three, including your own.
The goal is twofold. First, you want to find the best kind of loot you can on the map; you can earn loot as a reward by completing events that appear, taking on AI enemies (all of which are very dangerous and will easily kill you if you lose focus), and solving minor puzzles. Second, you’ll be trying to make progress on any contracts you have with the game’s major factions. While we didn’t get to interact with the contract and reputation metagame as much as I would have liked, it showed a lot of promise — especially for players who don’t just want to hunt other teams for sport.
When your backpack is full and contracts are complete, it’s time to find an Exfil location. When you activate your extraction beacon, it shoots up a giant “please don’t hurt me” beam into the sky that alerts all other players that someone is trying to escape with the good stuff. If you survive until the Exfil goes off, you keep your spoils, and it all goes into your vault for the next time you want to use it. If you die at any point in the match, you lose everything you had in your inventory and cannot get it back.
If that sounds harsh, it is. It’s kind of the point. And while there are some friendlier elements to Marathon when compared to Tarkov and games like it — your allies can revive you an unlimited number of times, for example — it’s the most hardcore and punishing game that Bungie has ever made. But that’s where all the tension is, and it’s what led to some truly adrenaline-pumping moments during my sessions, a reaction that genuinely surprised me.
Image: Bungie
When I first arrived at Bungie, I had assumed that Marathon wouldn’t be for me. I was a big Halo multiplayer guy in my youth, I’ve put hundreds of hours into PUBG, played plenty of Apex, and basically haven’t put down Destiny or its sequel since 2014. But as I age, I’m less inclined to engage with PvP, and for that reason, the extraction genre hasn’t ever truly gotten my attention. Although Bungie has managed to make games that speak to me for my entire life, my history with the studio wasn’t enough to outweigh my skepticism.
After the developers walked us through how Marathon works, I was escorted to the play area to get my hands on the game. The squads were premade, and I was placed in a group with another American journalist and one from a different country who struggled to communicate with us. And thus began our morning of getting destroyed. Whenever we ran into other players, it didn’t go well for us, in what admittedly felt like a true “random matchmaking” experience.
As I went to lunch for the day, I felt conflicted. On one hand, I worried that my PvP woes were well founded, and that Marathon would eventually not be very fun if I couldn’t reliably or confidently take on other squads. On the other hand, the game was slick as hell. The sleek, mechanical aesthetic is astounding, and the strong art direction has already driven up hype. As long as I was progressing my contracts and just being present in the world of Marathon, I was having fun. My concern was what would happen when those contracts turned more intense, and when not interacting with other players would no longer be an option.
Luckily, things changed after lunch, as Bungie decided to move my team around. Suddenly, we were joined by Kevin Yanes. All anyone would say about Yanes was that he was good at Marathon. That’s an understatement, I soon learned. Yanes changed the game for me and our third squadmate, not because he could carry us while we were learning — although that was certainly part of it, I won’t lie — but because he could teach us things that would have taken hours of playing on our own to discover.
When we dropped into our first match together, Yanes opened the map and pinged two nearby locations. “OK, we got a Complex spawn,” he said, denoting where on the map we were. “There are two other squads that can spawn here and here, so we need to be careful unless we want to go after them right away.” It was overwhelming — and intoxicating. What started as a team that absolutely did not want to get into scrapes became a squad that was actively hunting players down. Suddenly, mysterious gas-filled rooms that once seemed impossible to open, we now knew how to vent. An Exfil beam didn’t mean “thank god, a team is leaving” anymore; it was more like an enemy team’s dinner bell ringing to say, We found all this cool stuff for you; please come take it! And we did.
Image: Bungie
As my knowledge grew, so did my comfort level. In very short order, I found myself going from asking Yanes questions to taking my newfound knowledge and putting it into action. Still, I did worry that Marathon wouldn’t be fun without someone like Yanes as a squadmate. That the joy was in extracting with great shit every time, not in the game itself. But even when we lost to some extremely talented Valorant players on the final match of day 2, I found that I still felt good about my experience and my team.
It’s too bad that not every player out there will have Yanes to teach them the game — as much as his co-workers joked that they should ship him with every copy of Marathon. But they will have me. And their favorite streamers. And guides (on Polygon). And Tarkov friends. And Halo players. And Guardians from Destiny’s Crucible.
Since Halo, Bungie has relied not only on its skilled developers, but on its community of players around the world to help with tutorializing its games. For my friends, I will be Yanes when it comes to Marathon — I will be the online stranger I met when I played Halo for the first time back in the day.
Marathon is difficult. It’s punishing, and it’s intentionally frustrating. It has low lows and high highs, by design. It’s a difficult sell to the masses — the most difficult pitch Bungie has made yet. But what Bungie has always been good at is producing converts: players who see the vision, get pulled inside, and can’t wait to share the game with their friends. I find myself an unlikely convert to Marathon’s vision, and I left Bellevue desperate to get my hands on the game again — one of the best feelings you can have about something you’re playing when on the clock.
There are a million factors that could sink Marathon: the crowded live service market, the game’s monetization strategy — all that Bungie has confirmed is that it won’t be free-to-play — its release timing, and the state of the global economy. You’d have to be a fool to look at any upcoming game in 2025 and say, “That’s a surefire hit.” But what I can say, without being a fool, is that Marathon made me truly enjoy PvP for the first time in nearly a decade.
Others have been teaching me to play Bungie games for 20 years, and even if I won’t be as good a teacher as Kevin Yanes, I’m excited to pay it forward with my own friends when Marathon comes to PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Sept. 23.
Disclosure: This article is based on a Marathon preview event held at Bungie’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2-4. Bungie provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
