Bungie’s New Marathon Game Has an Amazing Short Film

After a decade focusing solely on its ongoing shared world shooter Destiny, Bungie is reviving its old sci-fi shooter series Marathon. As part of the game’s official unveiling on Saturday, the developer released a cinematic short that may be one of the coolest videos of 2025.

Written and directed by Spanish animator Alberto Mielgo—best known for Love, Death, & Robots and art director for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—the eight-minute video lays out the intriguing, violent, and more than a little unsettling sci-fi world of this new Marathon. As it opens, something…weird happens on the planet Tau Ceti IV. Some colonists are crushed by satellite debris from a meteor shower, others die where they stand in gruesome fashion. Even creepier is that we see these deaths span across several decades, from 2794 to 2812 and 2827. We then jump ahead to 2893, where cybernetic beings—former humans who have machine bodies crafted by cybernetic silkworms—are looting the colony for anything they can get their hands on to sell to various factions still stationed on the planet.

This second part of the cinematic, which features narration from Final Fantasy XVI’s Ben Starr, is meant to show you Marathon’s gameplay loop. Since this is a multiplayer extraction shooter, players will take on the role of cybernetic mercenaries called Runners to steal data, research, and the like for Tau Ceti’s various factions, and shoot each other (or the planet’s wildlife or security bots) to get loot and escape safely. But the main point of this cinematic is take you into Bungie’s new sci-fi world and offer glimpses of what you’ll see as you shoot each other into scrap. Vibes and atmosphere have always been one of Bungie’s strong suits, and what’s really interesting about this short is seeing Runners like Glitch (Erica Lindbeck) and Void (Elias Toufexis) be aware that something about Tau Ceti and their being there is wrong, but unable to fully vocalize why. Whatever’s drawn them there has its hooks in them deep, and not even getting shot to bits will keep them from keeping on after they’ve been rebuilt.

Fancy cinematics are nothing new for games at this point in the medium’s life. But for Bungie, Marathon feels like a massive step forward from what the studio’s previously done with Halo and Destiny. The game’s aesthetic is pretty striking and distinct from anything seen in major sci-fi games in quite some time. As cold as everything looks—this is, after all, a world shaken by its inhabitants mysteriously vanishing, possibly because of some thing roaming the hallways—there’s a vibrancy to the colors that don’t clash as much as you’d think. It’s also just shot differently than any Bungie cutscene to date; the camera being so close to the Runners provides intimatcy they’re not getting (or ignoring) from each other and makes the scenes where they die hit that much harder.

For many, this short will be enough to sell them on Marathon alone, and it’s likely Sony plans to use snippets of it to promote the game on TV. For others, the short has done everything right in terms of getting them hooked…but it’s a strictly multiplayer game with no single-player offering to speak of. That’s a real shame, since at their best, Bungie’s story campaigns were memorable and have stayed with players for years. It’s easy to imagine this being so engrossing if we were able to just be on Tau Ceti and investigate its secrets in an engaging narrative with tight gunplay and some sweet music. Ah, well—for the multiplayer heads, Marathon will run to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 23.

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