Marathon is the next game from Bungie, the acclaimed studio behind the Halo and Destiny franchises. The developer’s new game was originally set to come out last September, but the lukewarm reception it received from players who tried out the game’s alpha test led Bungie to delay the release to give it some fine-tuning.

It appears Bungie is ready to try again, as it confirmed that Marathon will be released this March. The company revealed the new release date on Jan. 19, when the pre-order trailer for the game was uploaded to YouTube. 

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When does Marathon come out? 

Marathon will be released on March 5 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles and will cost $40.

Will there be a Marathon playtest? 

Yes. The official Marathon X account posted on Jan. 19 that there will be an open preview weekend before the game’s launch. 

What is Marathon? 

Marathon is an action first-person shooter series developed by Bungie, first released in 1994 for the Apple Macintosh. It and the following two games of the original Marathon trilogy are science fiction mysteries set in the 28th century, when humans travel across space in starships. One of them, the UESC Marathon, is attacked by aliens until only a lone security guard, the player, is left to fight them off. Players discover that the ship’s artificial intelligence, called Durandal, has gone sentient and evil, and even called aliens to attack the ship. The following games have players uncovering the mysteries behind Durandal and other ancient AIs that have been manipulating alien races. 

The series was Bungie’s first hit, and it was innovative in its time for revealing story segments through computer terminals, where you could read messages from the different AI running the ship, as well as crew diaries. 

In this new version of Marathon, players will visit Tau Ceti IV, the planet that humans from the UESC Marathon settled. The year is 2893, and something has caused many of the colonists to disappear. Survivors have formed different groups to savage what they can from the colony. The people doing the savaging are known as «Runners,» who are humans trained in combat and who use cybernetic modifications to survive on the planet. Players will create their own Runner to get loot and learn what happened to the colony as they fight off aliens as well as other Runners. 

What is an extraction shooter? 

An exaction shooter is a type of online multiplayer game where the focus isn’t just about killing enemies or other players. Instead, the objective revolves around scavenging loot and completing missions. 

To make things exciting, players can only extract loot at designated locations in the game world. And to complicate things even further, the start of the extraction process will include some signal that alerts both enemies and players within the vicinity. This means you’ll have to defend yourself for a short period of time from what could be waves of computer-controlled enemies or human players who may or may not try to steal your loot. 

Some of the most popular extraction shooters out right now are Arc Raiders, Escape from Tarkov and Helldivers 2.

How is Marathon related to Halo? 

Marathon was Bungie’s first hit series, but it was Halo that made the developer a household name. While the two game franchises do not have any firm narrative connections, there have always been subtle references to the Marathon games in Halo. Bungie has said that Halo is more of a spiritual successor to Marathon, but there are fan theories connecting Marathon, Halo and even Bungie’s other major franchise, Destiny.