After so many years of making Destiny 2 expansions and updates, game maker Bungie is going back to the well with its reboot of its mid-90s first-person shooter franchise Marathon.

Originally a single-player story-focused boomer shooter, the 2025 remake of Marathon is a 5v5 extraction shooter set in a sci-fi setting where Runners are competing against each other to extract packages and winning matches on the hostile planet of Tau Ceti IV.

Runner types include the following: “Locus” is a soldier class for pushing forward, and can use a shield, “Void” is stealth, sneaks by undetected, and uses smoke grenades. “Blackbird” is reconnaissance-based, find players, positioning, and so forth.

Marathon will be out on 23 September for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series.  There will be an early Closed Alpha session for Marathon starting in April, later this month. You can join the Marathon Discord channel for a chance to get in. You can check out the gameplay overview and a trailer to see it in motion below.

And if you think this looks like any other extraction shooter but with a sleeker art style and aesthetic, well, you might be right.

Is Marathon & Bungie Cooked?

All signs may point to “yes” on this one. While initial previews of the game seem positive -satisfying Bungie gameplay and shooting- the experience around the game may not stand out. You don’t need me to tell you that there are a ton of FPSs and third-person shooters out there in a PvP setting: PUBG, Fortnite, Escape from Tarkov, Helldivers 2, Hunt: Showdown, and so forth.

Marathon will be out on 23 September, which is the same week as another big first-person title: Borderlands 4. While both games are different, they are premium games and most customers will need to pick one or the other for their shooter jollies. There’s also Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon, which is predicted to come out at the tail end of September or at the start of October.

Marathon will also be a premium product, meaning it’ll not be an F2P title. It won’t cost more than US$70 because that would be retail suicide. Assuming US$40 is its final price, it is still a commitment to take given most shooters in the genre are free-to-play and offer more value.

The current team in Bungie is not the same one that made the past Halo games under Xbox, Destiny, and Destiny 2. Make of that what you will, but there are two sides to the coin to this. The team that handled Destiny and Destiny 2 proved that they aren’t suited to making long-term multiplayer games as their quality output has been all over the place. For every Taken King and Witch Queen expansion, they bungled it up with Curse of Osiris and Lightfall.

The future may seem bleak for the new Bungie, but perhaps if they deliver on a good product that lasts over time, Marathon may not join the heavily-dense multiplayer shooter graveyard so soon. We’ll give it two years tops if they don’t get their act together.