Terrible news! Santa ignored all my letters asking for 2025 to be a year when no new videogames came out so I could catch up on everything I missed from the past several years. In fact, it seems like maybe someone else might have sent him a letter asking for there to be more big games coming than ever.
]]>Bungie have been fairly quiet about Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter they announced in 2023. Yesterday they released a devlog in which game director Joe Ziegler seemed to want to reassure fans of the studio that the game was still in development. He talked around a lot of the game features, without actually saying much about it. As yet, there's still no footage of the game in action, making its previous release window of 2025 appear even more tenuous.
]]>Earlier this year, Bungie's 1990s sci-fi shooter, Marathon, came to Steam for free. And Marathon 2 followed in July. But this series is a trilogy. Where's the third one? I want the thir-- oh, it's here now. Yesterday, the final game, Marathon Infinity trickled onto the storefront, offering a neat little bundle for fans of retro shooters. But it's also a reminder that we've yet to see more of Bungie's upcoming reboot.
]]>Destiny and Marathon developers Bungie are laying off 220 people - around 17% of their total workforce - as studio heads try to offset a financial crisis brought on by "overly ambitious" expansion, individual project "misfires", and a wider economic downturn in 2023. Bungie are also transferring a further 155 roles to parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment, and are spinning out an untitled incubation project - an "action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe" - to form a new PlayStation studio.
]]>Halo and Destiny developers Bungie have released their classic shooter Marathon for free on Steam, with sequels Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity to follow. The Steam ports are the work of the celebrated Aleph One community developers, who've kept Bungie's old Marathon 2 game engine going as an open source project - and who still have PC ports of all three games available on their own site, if you'd rather not truck with Steam.
]]>Bungie’s reboot of their nineties pre-Halo debut shooter Marathon seems to be slowing down its pace a little in order to get across the finish line, with a change in director and a delay meaning the multiplayer-only loot-shooter reimagining of the FPS is now expected to arrive next year - or potentially even after that, according to recent reports.
]]>Bungie have announced a change in director on their upcoming revival of their classic shooter Marathon, amid reports the studio is once again shaking up its creative leadership. Former Valorant director Joe Ziegler confirmed his appointment on Xwitter last night, replacing long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett in the role.
]]>Destiny 2 and Marathon studio Bungie are the next video game giant to be caught up in 2023’s brutal industry-wide wave of layoffs, as an undisclosed number of job cuts hit the veteran developer today.
]]>The legal battle between Microsoft and the US Federal Trade Commission continues to plod along as the FTC seeks to stop Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. Last week’s proceeding gave us some interesting revelations about revenue shares, Starfield development, and Indiana Jones exclusivity, but juicy inside baseball details continue to ooze out.
]]>2023 has seen the closure of more big multiplayer games than, well, any time I can recall in recent memory. One after the other, developers' dreams of making the next big Destiny-like have gradually collapsed in on themselves. Like a deflated concertina, their last honks of life have been crushed down to desperate, fizzling squeals as servers lie empty and the cost of maintaining them spirals out of control. Some are still hanging in there, sure, but the genre as a whole feels like it's at a tipping point - and I couldn't help but sigh as five more multiplayer shooters joined the fray last night as part of Sony's PlayStation Showcase.
]]>Here was the biggest surprise of tonight's PlayStation Showcase: Bungie are rebooting Marathon, their first-person shooter series that first launched on Apple Macintosh in 1994. You can watch the first trailer below.
]]>My first videogame memory is about falling. I remember a blue sky and green land and some yellow rectangle where I was supposed to land, but couldn’t, because I was three or four years old and videogames were new and confusing. Unable to control my plane, I could only watch it spiral and crash. The game was Hellcats over the Pacific. I learned this only twenty years later, when I recognised it in a video compilation of old games. The name of this flight sim evaded me for so long because I grew up with a Mac, and no one ever talks about the few scrappy games that were available to us, the children of the nineties who, for one reason or another, got stuck with the uncool operating system.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
While DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D are known throughout the world as the original murder simulators, other shooters that followed were content to quietly improve the genre. Marathon was one of them.
]]>Let me tell you about one of my favourite levels. It's from a funny old game called Marathon Infinity, and it's brilliant.
]]>It seems likely that some of you will not be aware of '90s classic Marathon, which was one of those obscure-yet-influential games in the history of the shooter. It was one of the things Bungie did before they really made hay with the Halo games. Anyway, fans have continued the series, as well as powered a number of other games, with an open-source engine-creating effort called Aleph One, and that project recently hit a big old milestone, v1.0. This means it's a good time to download one of the games related to the project if you are looking for some retro FPS adventures. Needless to say there are Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.
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