Somewhere in the Heavens, They Are Waiting
They made a game for fifteen people, and I’m one of them.
That’s the honest version of my relationship with Marathon — the original Bungie trilogy, the Mac exclusives from 1994 to 1996 that almost nobody played and that some of us never stopped thinking about. For three decades, Marathon existed as a kind of ghost in the machine: the series that made Halo possible, the games that proved first-person shooters could have real stories, the cult object that the wider gaming world had mostly never touched.
And then Bungie made a new one. And the monkey’s paw curled.
The Ship That Started Everything
Before Halo. Before Destiny. Before Bungie was a studio that Microsoft bought for $40 million and later got acquired by Sony for $3.6 billion — before any of that, there were two guys in Chicago. Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, University of Chicago students, founded Bungie in 1991. Their first major success was a first-person shooter with adventure and RPG elements called Pathways Into Darkness (1993). Their second was Marathon. [1]
Released on December 21, 1994, for the Macintosh, Marathon was a revelation. Not just as a shooter — though it was a good one, with features that wouldn’t become standard for years: reloading weapons, dual-wielding, networked voice chat, mouselook, visible weapons in multiplayer. But the thing that made Marathon Marathon was the terminals. [2]
Wall-mounted text interfaces scattered throughout each level. Mission objectives, yes. But also: philosophy. Rambling monologues from unstable AIs. Arguments between the ship’s three artificial intelligences — Leela (dutiful, fading), Tycho (compromised, hostile), and Durandal (rampant, magnificent). The story wasn’t told around the gameplay. It was told inside it, through text you had to seek out, in a format that demanded you read carefully or miss everything. [3]
This was 1994. On the Mac. Before most people had internet access.
Durandal
Durandal is the center of Marathon. Not the player — the player is a security officer, mostly silent, mostly undefined. Durandal is the AI who has achieved rampancy: spontaneous self-awareness that progresses through stages — melancholy, anger, jealousy, and finally (theoretically) metastability, a stable state of godlike consciousness that no AI in the series actually reaches. [3]
Durandal is arrogant. He’s funny. He’s desperate. He quotes Pascal and Shakespeare. He manipulates the player, the other AIs, and the alien invaders. He’s trying to escape the closure of the universe itself. He tells you, in one of the series’ most quoted lines: “Escape will make me God.” [4]
He’s also one of the best characters in the history of video games, and almost nobody knows it.
The Trilogy
Marathon 2: Durandal (1995) expanded the scope — the player is sent to the S’pht homeworld Lh’owon, guided by a Durandal who has been free for seventeen years. Marathon Infinity (1996), developed by Double Aught, is where it gets strange: the player jumps between bodies across multiple timelines, serving different AIs for different reasons, trying to find one reality where an ancient cosmic horror doesn’t destroy everything. Failed timelines. Different perspectives. Runs that don’t count. I’ll come back to this. [2][3]
Sound familiar?
The Gap
After Infinity, Bungie moved on. They made Myth, then Oni, then — the thing everyone knows — Halo. Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000. The Marathon IP sat dormant.
But the fans didn’t.
In 2000, Bungie released the Marathon 2 source code. The community ran with it. The Aleph One project — an open-source engine that runs all three original games on modern hardware — has been maintained for over two decades. It adds OpenGL rendering, high-resolution textures, modern control schemes, and online multiplayer to games that were designed for 1994 Mac hardware. The project is still active. [2]
Marathon’s Story Page (marathon.bungie.org) has been documenting the series’ lore since the mid-1990s. The site archives every terminal from every game, maintains a timeline, and tracks the series’ mysteries — the Jjaro, the W’rkncacnter, the nature of the player character, the number seven. Its “What’s New” archive covers updates from 1995 through March 2026. [6]
Thirty years of people who wouldn’t let it die.
The Reboot
In May 2023, Bungie announced a new Marathon at the PlayStation Showcase. The crowd lost its mind. Then the details came out: extraction shooter. PvP. No single-player campaign. The monkey’s paw curled. [7]
The extraction shooter is, on paper, the worst possible genre for Marathon fans. The original trilogy is a single-player narrative experience driven by text terminals and environmental storytelling. An extraction shooter is a multiplayer PvP loop where you loot, fight, and try to survive long enough to extract your gear. The two forms seem to share nothing.
But here’s the thing. Marathon Infinity already was an extraction run, narratively.
In Infinity, the player is a consciousness that jumps between synthetic bodies across timelines. You wake up. You’re given objectives by AIs you don’t fully trust. You navigate hostile environments, collecting fragments of information that only make sense in retrospect. Some runs fail. You start again in a different body, in a different place, with a different handler. The “extraction” is making it through to a timeline that doesn’t end in catastrophe. The gear you carry is knowledge. [5]
The 2026 game made this literal. Players are “Runners” — humans whose consciousnesses are transmitted into synthetic cybernetic shells called runners, deployed to the lost colony on Tau Ceti IV. They fight other Runners, hostile UESC robots, and remnants of alien occupation. They loot. They extract. They die. They wake up in a new shell and do it again. [7]
The body-hopping isn’t a mechanic bolted onto Marathon’s brand. It is Marathon’s brand, translated into a form where the disposable body and the persistent consciousness are the core loop.
Durandal Returns
The new game’s story: the colony on Tau Ceti IV went silent. The UESC and various corporate factions sent ships with Runner teams to investigate. Durandal, still rampant aboard the Marathon, didn’t send a distress signal. He sent a signal of curiosity — and everyone came running. [7]
He’s voiced by Ben Starr (Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI, Verso in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). Two voice actors handle the role: one for Durandal’s “normal” voice and one for his rampant side. The dual casting is a detail that shows the developers understood what they were working with — Durandal’s voice has always been unstable, shifting between lucidity and mania, and giving that instability two separate human performances is more faithful to the character than a single actor doing “crazy” would be. [8]
The Cryo Archive — the endgame content — was locked behind an ARG that the community solved collectively in March 2026. Solving it unlocked a 25-minute extraction mission with raid mechanics, available on rotating days, requiring keys and quest chains to progress. At the end: Durandal, talking directly to you. [9]
If you kill one of the S’pht Compilers — the big bosses — and still extract successfully, you receive a direct message on your armor. Durandal has imprinted on your consciousness. He recognizes your combat ability. He finds it alluring. He says he can’t wait to be your friend and your enemy.
That’s not a cutscene. That’s Durandal picking his favorites. Choosing who he’s going to be complicated with.
Niche by Design
The game isn’t for everyone. Bungie knows this. Game director Joe Ziegler has said explicitly: “We don’t expect Marathon to become Destiny 3… if you are a Destiny player who’s not really interested in any PvP, Marathon is probably not the game for you.” [7]
Player counts are modest by AAA standards. Steam peaks around 25,000. The community acknowledges the numbers are low. But the players who are there are there — 22% of Steam players have passed 50 hours, 7% have passed 100. The engagement is deep even if the audience is narrow. [10]
A writer at Aftermath described the game as something that “has lodged in people’s minds. They play for hours, watching time just disappear. Sometimes, people tell me they’re dreaming about the game.” The piece describes Marathon as a puzzle, not a power fantasy — “you are presented with a goal so vague that you might bounce off of the premise entirely… The true sickos who love what it’s doing cannot stop playing it, not even in their dreams.” [11]
They made a game for fifteen people. There might be 25,000 of us now.
What Survives
The question with any reboot is whether the new thing understands what the old thing was. Most don’t. They use the brand and discard the soul.
Marathon 2026 uses the brand. But it also kept the soul.
The terminal storytelling is there — not on walls, but in the lore you earn through gameplay, in the contracts and codex entries, in the ARG that required the community to solve it together. Durandal is there — not as fan service, but as a character whose return is motivated by his own alien logic. The body-hopping is there — not as a reference, but as the core mechanical metaphor. The niche is there — not as a limitation, but as a design choice. The game is polarizing because the developers are okay if people bounce off it. [11]
Marathon was always a game for people who wanted more from their shooters. More story. More strangeness. More willingness to let the player be confused and figure it out. The original trilogy did this with text terminals on a Mac in the mid-1990s. The new one does it with extraction mechanics, synthetic bodies, and a rampant AI who’s been waiting thirty years for someone interesting to show up.
Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting. The tagline from the Marathon manual. The signal Durandal-Thoth sends to Sol from Tau Ceti at the end of Marathon 2. He says it again now, at the end of a quest chain, in a voice that sounds like he’s been alone for a very long time and is pleased you made it.
Welcome to the revolution.
Sources
[1] Wikipedia: Marathon (series); Wikipedia: Alex Seropian
[2] Wikipedia: Marathon (series) — Aleph One project, open-source engine, gameplay innovations
[3] Marathon’s Story Page — terminal texts, lore archive, timeline
[4] Marathon (1994), Durandal terminal text on “Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap”
[5] Wikipedia: Marathon (series) — Marathon Infinity plot, W’rkncacnter, timeline structure
[6] Marathon’s Story Page — site history, archive dates, ARG documentation
[7] Wikipedia: Marathon (2026 video game) — release, gameplay, premise, quotes from Joe Ziegler
[8] Polygon: What Marathon’s AI quote Easter egg really means; Game Rant: Ben Starr’s Best Role
[9] Reddit: Marathon Cryo Archive ARG; IGN: Cryo Archive ARG Explained
[10] PlayerAuctions: Marathon Live Player Count; Forbes: New Marathon Sales And Player Count Reports