A bunch of videos began making the rounds last night, purporting to show an accidentally-too-early live trailer for Bungie’s Marathon, one that was watchable on Xbox at one point. The trailer ended with a release date for the game, marking the first confirmation outside the initially stated March window.
According to my sources, the March 5, 2026 date is legitimate. Bungie sort of confirmed that itself by starting to issue DMCA takedowns with the trailer being shared on social media, something you wouldn’t bother with if it were some sort of AI fake. And it was way too elaborate for that, besides.
That trailer and the official announcement of the date should take place tomorrow, which is also when preorders for the $40 game will go live, around a month and a half before release. It will be the apex of a recent marketing push for Marathon after its delay from last fall, during which we’ve seen a bunch of gameplay clips and, most recently, a well-received vidoc about its character classes. Though it still has a mountain to climb.
Part of that mountain, easily the most important bit before launch, will be the free open beta. I’m told that it will be toward the end of February, so don’t expect it this month or a full month before launch, or anything. This is pretty standard for the genre and will be a key test of player interest, given that it’s free rather than demanding $40. However, in the case of Marathon rival ARC Raiders, the game smashed its free trial numbers, more than doubling them with the actual release. That…does not happen often.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Marathon will be a turning point moment for Bungie, the game in development for at least five years, before the Sony purchase, and a key part of its appeal. It’s suffered an ejected director, at least one major overhaul, and a poor debut last summer, alongside a plagiarism scandal. This latest marketing push, however, has been much better received, and Marathon does seem to be gaining some amount of momentum here before launch. It’s still not clear whether mega-success ARC Raiders may help or hurt Marathon. Marathon may arrive at a key moment when ARC players are tiring of the game. Or there are too many still committed to it to pay $40 for a different extraction game and start from scratch.
The March 5 release date puts the game within Sony’s promised Q4 release window, which it did not guarantee at the time but was its forecast last we heard. It will make it with under a month to spare. Like other Sony live multiplayer games, Marathon is launching on PS5 and PC, but part of Bungie’s original deal was that their games are true cross-platform, so Marathon will be on Xbox as well. The Xbox where you could just watch this leak.
So, tune back in tomorrow for a non-bootleg version of the trailer, and get your digital wallets ready if you so choose.
Follow me on Twitter and YouTube.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.