Marathon: Bungie Hid a Ton of Secrets in Reveal Trailer, Including a Mini Video Documentary

Bungie has shared a new video documentary about Marathon, its newly announced sci-fi PvP extraction shooter.

Announced at yesterday’s PlayStation Showcase, the new Marathon is the first entry in the franchise since 1996. The game is PvP-focused and won’t have a single-player campaign, but it will honor the mythology and story of the original Marathon games.

We’ve already learned even more details about the upcoming shooter thanks to a six-and-a-half minute video Bungie posted after fans quickly solved one of the developer’s famous ARG (alternate reality game) puzzles.

We’ll get to the scavenger hunt Bungie fans went on yesterday to uncover the ViDoc, but first, let’s get to the content of the video itself. 

In Marathon, you play as a Runner exploring the hostile world of Tau Ceti IV while searching for artifacts and weapons. Bungie showed off concept art for the Runners, describing them as a combination of fashion, sci-fi, and cyberpunk. 

Bungie says players will be a part of the narrative in Marathon that will unfold over the course of a season. For example, one extraction team may find an alien key that unlocks a new zone. The responsibility then falls on those players to figure out how to unlock the zone for everyone else. 

Marathon is releasing on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and it will have full crossplay and cross progression. No release date was given, but Bungie said it is marching towards its alpha. The team plans to go dark for a while to work on the game, saying we will see gameplay the next time Marathon emerges. 

Bungie Fans Follow a Trail of Breadcrumbs to Unlock the Marathon ViDoc 

It turns out Bungie hid a ton of secrets in yesterday’s reveal trailer, including one puzzle that involved Bungie developers posting cryptic images on social media. When the community tracked down all 12 secret images and overlaid them, it revealed a sequence of dots. 

Thanks to some hints from a well-hidden Marathon Twitter account, the community discovered this was a binary sequence that needed to be run through a punch card decoder. This led the puzzle solvers to a stream that needed 7,777 viewers to unlock the full ViDoc. Destiny YouTuber Skarrow9 solved the final step of the puzzle yesterday evening, and posted a video explaining the solution in full. 

There are even more secrets hidden within Marathon’s reveal trailer. In fact, Skarrow9 shared a Google Doc that is tracking all of the secrets Bungie fans are working on uncovering. In less than 24 hours since the reveal, the Marathon community has already put in a ton of legwork, as this document stretches across 37 pages of clues and findings. 

The unsolved mysteries include decoding pages of a Marathon Zine, figuring out purchase order and memo documents, and a lot more. 

Bungie is known for teasing fans with these scavenger hunts, digging a number of deep, winding rabbit holes for Destiny fans to discover throughout the years. The developer’s ARG history stretches all the way back to the Halo days, when it promoted Halo 2 on a website called ilovebees.com.

For more, check out every announcement from yesterday’s PlayStation Showcase 2023.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over seven years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.