• News

Marathon gameplay reveal coming next weekend, ARG ongoing

A community-led effort to solve Bungie's ARG puzzles has unlocked a gameplay announcement date with more secrets being discovered.

Sam Chandler

April 6, 2025 5:35 PM

Bungie

2

A Marathon gameplay reveal is arriving on April 12, 2025. This information was unearthed following a massive community effort to solve a still-ongoing ARG set within Bungie’s iconic Marathon universe.

Over the weekend, players around the world discovered that Bungie was spooling up its Marathon content. The Bungie press site had new Marathon imagery and a new we_are_mida social media account popped up and started sharing extremely cryptic images and text.

Users quickly discovered a website with a hidden image, a link that indicated Twitch login credentials were needed, decrypting symbols, a Traxus Global website featuring what appears to be a planetary system, and more. There’s a lot. There’s so much that MrRoflWaffles has a 31-minute video explaining a large segment of how users were starting to solve the puzzles. Think: finding hexadecimal codes by listening to audio tracks hidden within a website. Yeah, Bungie is the leader at these ARG puzzles.

Cut to today, and users had managed to discover the correct numbers to lock in the Traxus Global planetary system. This released a short save-the-date Marathon video seen above. Bungie will be revealing actual Marathon gameplay on Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m.ET (3:00 a.m. AEST for my fellow Aussies).

The fun doesn’t stop there. As of writing, MrRofleWaffles is still live on Twitch (34 hours and counting) as he attempts to piece together images to create what appears to be a Marathon character’s face.

It’s a good time to be a Bungie fan as the company always excels at these sorts of ARG and building hype for its upcoming games. Taking that idea a step further, experiencing a Bungie game on day one, with the rest of a community, is one of the best moments in gaming. Everything is so foreign and mysterious, you’re all learning at the same time, and there’s a rich new universe to explore.

This is the first we’ve heard about Marathon, in an official capacity, since October 2024 when game director Joe Ziegler confirmed that playtests are coming this year. Prior to that, Bungie announced the Marathon reboot and then stated it would go dark until it had more information to share – that time is now upon us.

Stay tuned to our Marathon page as we cover the gameplay reveal and the latest news regarding Bungie’s extraction shooter.

Sam Chandler

Head of Guides

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as Head of Guides. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler