A streamer played an hour of Marathon early before Bungie cut him off – Rock Paper Shotgun
2025-04-22T14:50:17Z
A player for Marathon’s closed alpha was accidentally given access to the shooter a day before Bungie meant it, and started streaming.
The closed alpha for Marathon is soon due to roll out to players who signed up, meaning Bungie’s colourful futuristic servers are warming up. Sadly, we weren’t invited – the alpha is only open to North Americans. But, aha, something went awry today and the game became available to play early for those on Xbox. And one quick-witted player streamed a full hour of the game before the servers clamped shut once again.
Twitch user “bomberboyz130” began streaming the shooter today, after Bungie accidentally granted players on Xbox the ability to play too early. He played a handful of matches, most of them on a relatively small map called “Perimeter”, getting into PvE scrapes with guard bots and robo-bugs before eventually escaping the map with some loot. He plays as a couple of the classes, including the tanky shield deploying Locus, and the smoke-bombing Void who can don stealth camouflage for a sure-to-be-nerfed 15 seconds. You can watch him play on Twitch if you’re so inclined.
The stream lasted over an hour until the servers went down and bomberboyz was booted out from even the menus. There were jokes in the chat about Bungie’s death squads coming out of the woodwork to shut everything down and presumably put him in a big neon plastic bodybag (alpha players signed a non-disclosure agreement) but according to the developer this was all down to a technical cock-up that they’ve now corrected.
“We have fixed an issue where some Xbox players were able to access the Closed Alpha Playtest early,” said Bungie on the game’s official server. “All players with Closed Alpha access will be able to join on April 23 at 10AM Pacific.”
So yeah, hopefully nobody needs to disappear. Not a soul here at RPS has had their hands on the game so far, like I say, but from this footage it seems in line with previews I’ve read. It appears to trek head-bobbingly down all the well-trodden extraction shooter paths, albeit with Bungie’s chunky triggerfeels. It reminds me as much of battle royale Apex Legends as it does Escape From Tarkov. The RPS treehouse is split as to whether the art style is eye-catching and cool or plastic and dull.
Marathon is due out September 23rd this year. It was announced in 2023 as a PvP reboot of Bungie’s classic FPS for Macs. But its development has been troubled thanks to brutal layoffs and a messy spat resulting from the game’s former director being forced to step aside over misconduct allegations. Bungie eventually broke a long silence surrounding the game to reveal what it actually looked like earlier this month.
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