When I talk about Marathon on the internet, I hear a common refrain. It has lodged in people’s minds. They play for hours, watching time just disappear. Sometimes, people tell me they’re dreaming about the game. I’m dreaming about it too.
In my dreams, I am a runner. A worm prints my body and my consciousness is born into it, crystallized from caterpillar to moth. Rain beats down on my synthetic form on Tau Ceti IV, lightning striking mere meters from me. I duck in and out of buildings that look like they are made of candy. I am gunned down by shells that look like mine; I drown in blood as blue as painter’s tape. Then I rise again, silk from a worm once more. My alarm clock rings in Brooklyn. What I hear is Poppy’s voice singing, “in death we’ve just begun.”
The thing about Marathon is that the entire game is a puzzle. Marathon is ostensibly an “extraction shooter,” a genre typified by games like Arc Raiders and Escape from Tarkov, but I don’t think that describes what is going on in this game very well. But like Breath of the Wild, like Dwarf Fortress, like Elden Ring, you are presented with a goal so vague that you might bounce off of the premise entirely. Marathon is a game that offers you a map and says “figure out how to stay alive” and then lets a lot of the video game occur inside your head. The stakes, the tension, the drama from each run is something you determine.
Yesterday, I was playing in a squad of two with my friend, trying to finish off a contract so I could get access to a new faction—essentially, trying to progress a little more so I could get access to more loot and cosmetics. Because it was just the two of us, we had to play it really cautiously. We dropped into Dire Marsh, a map that my friend told me has killed them through environmental hazards alone, and shortly after we landed I did indeed die to a poison plant while running away from a turret.
As we crouch-walked through the swamp, our backs toward the edge of the map so nothing could sneak up on us, my friend and I heard gunfire. I didn’t hear anything in response, so I assumed it was a team fighting against some bots. We didn’t need to approach the building from that angle, so we ducked through the weeds—I jokingly called it “space Vietnam.”
We got closer to our objective and heard gunshots again, from the southwest. This time, it was clear that two teams were going at it. My friend and I ducked into an abandoned building on the outskirts of the map, hoping that no one spotted us. After thirty seconds of silence we tried again, only to realize that these teams were going at it right in front of us.
Running in Marathon is nerve wracking, by the way. Everything you do makes a sound, and everything that makes a sound can attract an enemy. Opening doors makes a sound, and closing a door makes a louder sound. Looting makes a sound. Crouch-walking makes a sound. All these sounds are distinct from each other—you learn a lot about what’s going around you by just listening. The most information rich sound in Marathon is running. It is loud, even louder when you do it through water, and you can very accurately find the source of running and gunfire by listening closely and following what you hear. The most dangerous thing in Marathon is giving information about your whereabouts to another runner, because quite frequently they’ll kill you shortly after.
All this was on my mind when my friend and I tried to finish my quest, which amounted to a button prompt next to a cargo crate and then picking up a few nearby items. We were lucky-–the two teams seemed to have moved on. We tried to gun it to an extraction site, but my friend was able to see that there was another team there. Even at exfil—maybe especially at exfil—you can’t trust that the other team will be friendly. We tried to run into the extraction zone just as it closed but missed it by mere seconds. The only option we had was the guarded exfil, which spawns bots as soon as it’s triggered.
My friend was using the Recon shell, which gave them the ability to spot incoming enemies from afar, and I was using Assassin, which lets me go invisible and toss out a smoke grenade. I felt like we had a good chance of being able to extract without attracting attention. As has become routine when I’m using the Assassin shell, I went invisible to turn on the exfil site, and then tossed my smoke grenade as soon as the bots came down. But of course, all that commotion attracted attention. The squad that had been murdering other shells all throughout our run descended on us. We were dead before we could extract—but the bots killed the other team too. All for nothing!
You decide which puzzle you are solving each run. Are you playing the “loot everything and sneak out like a ghost” game, or the “kill everything you see” game? You’re also allowed to change your mind, go from ghost to murderer, within a single run.
I turn this beautiful puzzle over in my head every night before I go to sleep, every morning upon waking. And that’s not even getting into the lore, which sometimes is called to the front of my mind when I’m living my normal life, reflected in everything I do and see. One of the factions is an evil McDonald’s that’s merged with Monsanto; another, anarchists that are absolutely willing to firebomb a Walmart in their quest to rid the universe of corps; another is basically just Amazon. It’s insightful speculative fiction that looks at the world of the gig economy and makes the bodies of workers literally expendable, designed to be killed by their manufacturers.
And that’s not even getting into the game’s visual language, which stuns me every time I load it up. The color choices are so thoughtful—those harsh planes of neon differentiate the manmade buildings from the landscape of Tau Ceti IV and makes calling out enemy locations and points of interest so easy (I’m in the blue building, head for the pink tunnel). Each new run I land on a new detail from the game’s design and am awed by the level of confidence in these choices. The game is polarizing because the developers are okay if people bounce off of it. The true sickos who love what it’s doing cannot stop playing it, not even in their dreams.
