I expected Marathon to be a relatively straightforward sci-fi extraction shooter. You play as a cybernetic Runner — a disembodied consciousness implanted into a disposable shell — investigating the ruins of an abandoned human colony on Tau Ceti IV. Each run sees you competing with other teams to collect loot and fight off UESC security robots before exfiltrating offworld, or dying and starting the cycle again. It’s a satisfying gameplay loop that, like other extraction shooters and even battle royales, doesn’t necessarily need deep lore to support it. But if the original Marathon trilogy from the 1990s — and numerous hints developer Bungie has dropped — are any indication, the new game may introduce something much weirder than rogue robots: alien civilizations, ancient precursor technology, and even primordial entities capable of breaking the laws of physics.
At a glance, the original Marathon from 1994 looks like a sci-fi Doom clone set aboard a colony ship in space. But the alien mysteries are there right from the jump. You play a security officer aboard the Marathon colony ship fighting a race of alien slavers called the Pfhor. Over the course of the trilogy, however, Bungie gradually revealed a much stranger sci-fi universe lurking behind the scenes. Among the races enslaved by the Pfhor are the S’pht, essentially brains carried by floating cybernetic bodies — and they’ve already been shown in the new game.
Toward the end of the eight-minute “In Death We’ve Just Begun” cinematic released on March 3, a trio of runners see a glowing green light in a dark corridor that fires off an energy blast. A few moments later, a similar figure levitates at the mouth of a cave with tendrils and a red cape swirling around it. In one of the final scenes, a Runner is looting some kind of storage locker and finds what looks like a human-constructed S’pht doll.
Even Bungie’s official roadmap hints players will face more than just UESC robots. As part of season 1, players will “discover a way aboard the derelict UESC Marathon ship hanging above,” and doing so will unlock the fourth zone, Cryo Archive. “Prepare your mind and shell to take on this end-game zone on the Marathon ship, where you’ll solve security puzzles, unseal frozen vaults, and come face-to-face with an entity even the UESC fears,” the post reads. That “entity” is likely the S’pht featured in the cinematic.
Season 2, called Nightfall, will also feature a version of the Dire Marsh zone set at night, “where you’ll fight to survive when the lights go out, UESC reinforcements flood in, and the a~~~~~%^&*()_+{}:”?~~~.” That odd redaction is weird and creepy, to say the least. There’s also the obvious we haven’t even touched upon here yet: what happened to the 30,000 humans living in the Tau Ceti IV colony? At least one S’pht is being presented here as a sort of season 1 endgame raid boss, but there have to be cosmic forces even more powerful at play to explain what’s at the heart of the game’s core mystery. And if the original Marathon trilogy is any guide, it’ll be full-on cosmic horror.
