Over the course of about two weeks in March, thousands of Marathon players stopped chasing loot and working on their faction contracts. They were shouting over proximity chat, begging enemy players to hold their fire as they scrambled across the game’s maps hunting down special terminals. Some were watching Twitch streams of someone solving complex math problems for hours on end. Everybody was trying to solve an alternate reality game (ARG) that went on to unlock the game’s first raid-like experience, Cryo Archive.
The ARG event, called “Breach Protocol,” was so complex that players compiled a 73-page document to track its many steps. Most of that work was coordinated within the game’s official Discord server. But “Breach Protocol” wasn’t the beginning.
Marathon’s live-service experience began years before the game even launched, when Bungie and creative agency Kurppa Hosk started building the game’s systems in the spaces around it. Through a series of ARGs, Discord-based progression tools, and live events, the team essentially created a version of Marathon that players could engage with long before they ever set foot on Tau Ceti IV.
Kurppa Hosk began collaborating with Bungie in 2021 with an initial focus on the visual aesthetic of the game’s world, including the iconography related to faction brand identities like Nucaloric and MIDA. But over time, the partnership grew to support the game’s entire marketing campaign.
“From the jump, we wanted the community involved in our marketing, both pre-launch and post-launch,” Bungie principal marketing manager Nick Clifford told Polygon in a video call. That meant building promotional experiences that players could participate in.
When Bungie first revealed Marathon in 2023, it also kicked off its first ARG tied to the game, something the studio has done before with games like Destiny and its sequel. There were QR codes and clues hidden inside the game’s reveal trailer that directed players to in-universe corporate websites where more puzzles awaited. (The document overviewing that ARG is 95 pages long.) Fans quickly began piecing together the game’s world through faction pages like Sekiguchi Genetics and Traxus Global, diving into puzzles that extended far beyond the initial announcement. One particular website, hearoursilence.com initially contained data referencing real-life coordinates to a location in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach where players found graffiti. The UESC has since seized control of the website.
The goal was to give players a way to experience the world of Marathon rather than just explain it. Kurppa Hosk describes this as “designing the desire to play.”
At one point in time, the QR code on this worm linked to the website for Sekiguchi Genetics, the in-universe manufacturer of Runner Shell technology.By the time Marathon’s April 2025 gameplay reveal rolled around, Kurppa Hosk and Bungie’s approach had leveled up. Three days before the reveal, various websites used in the first ARG came back online, leading players through a series of puzzles. After strings of code were deciphered into text, a message was revealed: Discord is the path forward.
When the Discord server went live, so did a bot named NULL//TRANSMIT.ERR that functions as a sort of AI players still interact with today on ARG components.
“Community is part of Bungie’s DNA,” Clifford said. “So when we baked that into our thinking, we considered where we wanted the community to congregate. And today, that’s Discord.”
Beyond using it as a straightforward community hub, Kurppa Hosk developed a gamified subsystem within the platform. Players are able to generate Digital Access Cards — DACs — in one of the server’s channels and complete contracts to essentially earn Discord XP, complete with a leaderboard showcasing the most learned members of the community. “That’s where the idea for the DACs came together,” Clifford said. “The unique identifiers that you could unlock on Discord and then use throughout every component of the ARG to track your progress.”
On the official Marathon Discord server, you can select a specific faction to rep which gains you access to special channels.
The system allowed Bungie to lightly introduce some of the game’s mechanics before they existed in the game itself. “The Discord enables us to use some unique functionality as well that we’ve built, like having contracts to do before they were actually out in the game,” Kurppa Hosk senior product manager Anton Rönsjö told Polygon.
In other words, some Runners were already completing contracts and earning XP a year before the game was released. Eventually, Marathon’s Discord grew to include 400,000 members, becoming the largest ever for an unreleased game. The team also credits this strategy with Marathon’s strong launch. February’s server slam surpassed 100,000 concurrent players on Steam within 30 minutes, and it has since sold around 1.2 million copies across all platforms.
The Discord server came in handy when players had to tackle Breach Protocol to unlock Cryo Protocol, serving as a major hub for sharing clues, theories, and strategies for overcoming each step in the process. Some hunted for clues inside Marathon’s maps, interacting with terminals and uncovering fragments of information. Others worked on decoding messages and tracking patterns. Progress depended on players dividing up tasks and pooling their knowledge — all while leveling up their DACs in Discord.
“When we design these different ARGs, we’re always looking to make them for a collective intelligence,” Rönsjö said. “We’re relying on each user to make small contributions to the bigger solution.” That approach allowed Bungie to design challenges that appealed to different kinds of players rather than just code breakers.
“This last ARG has been extra fun,” Kurppa Hosk senior copywriter Paul Martinsson said, “because they have so many different types of puzzles to complete. Some players really enjoy roaming around and finding clues, other times we saw someone streaming for hours solving complex math problems. That was his contribution.”
No single player could solve Breach Protocol alone, but together, the community pushed it forward through the final step of eliminating 500 million UESC bots to finally unlock Cryo Archive.
All of these various systems had fully converged with the game itself. The distinction between marketing and gameplay had dissolved. The Marathon servers may have gone live on March 5, 2026. But the Marathon live-service game had already been running for years.
As for the ARGs, Marathon is far from finished. Clifford said that the team is fast at work mapping out what the future of the game looks like, and they remain committed to continuing Bungie’s legacy for ARG experience that work in tandem with the game itself.
