Bungie didn’t just drop a trailer for Marathon—they rolled out a cool ARG that had players hooked before they even got their hands on the controller. Players have been rewarded with some weapon teasers as a result.
If the term is new to you, ARG means Alternate Reality Game, a format where real-world platforms (websites, Discord, social media, and even livestreams) are used to deliver a narrative full of puzzles.
In Marathon, it was the main thing that shaped the early worldbuilding. It started quietly with some cryptic posts on Marathon’s official X account. The video clips had glitches, unusual phrases, and coded messages.
It didn’t take long for the community to start buzzing, especially once players recognized symbols and references related to the in-game corporation named MIDA. Soon after, a string of strange and intricate clues started emerging.
Players made their first real discovery when they stumbled upon a site called HearOurSilence, which directed them to a special Twitch overlay. Streamers could turn on this overlay while streaming Marathon, and the ARG’s progress depended on how many viewers were watching live.
When viewership hit 10,000, the community unlocked +714 Frontier, the first major coordinate that would end up being key for satellite puzzles. At this point, what started as a series of weird tweets had become a massive scavenger hunt, spanning social media, Twitch, and hidden web pages.
The story didn’t stop there as players soon decoded ASCII art images, revealing secret terminal commands. The commands led to a hidden Discord server, where a bot called Null Transmitter gave “contracts” to the participants.
click to enlargeThe tasks were decoding Base64 and hex strings, analyzing spectrograms of distorted audio clips, and even cross-referencing lore from corporate memos with in-game clues.
A fictional satellite site, Traxus.Global was found and served as a control panel where users input coordinates to advance the mystery. Players had to upload DACs (Data Authentication Codes) to Traxus.Global to move forward.
These DACs were image files found in Discord challenges, with over 2,000 players needed to move to the next stage. Once they did, new coordinates were uncovered: -978 Transit and -413 Core. When combined with the existing Frontier coordinate, these allow players to align satellites using the Traxus interface.
That alignment triggered a countdown to April 12, when Bungie unveiled a "Save the Date" trailer tied to the full game reveal. The effort that went into solving this ARG was nothing short of massive.
Discord servers ballooned with activity, and dedicated players worked around the clock posting updates, testing new codes, and guiding others through each step.
Major contributions came from influencers and ARG experts like Aztecross, MrRoflWaffles, and several YouTubers, who helped solve some of the trickier parts while keeping thousands of viewers updated live. Bungie even invited some of them to preview the game ahead of public reveal dates.
The Marathon ARG stood out not only for its complexity but also for how it mirrored the game's themes. The unfolding narrative in the ARG showed a corporate-run, AI-surveilled world where information held power, and resistance required careful strategy, coordination, and persistence.
Even now, some parts of the ARG remain unsolved. Certain websites are still partially locked, and Discord bots still hold encrypted files that haven’t been cracked.
Regardless of whether Bungie launches another phase, the ARG has already done its job: it pulled people into Marathon’s universe in a way no traditional trailer ever could.