A reference portal to the Marathon universe: timeline, the death of the colony, Runners and shells, classes, arsenal, factions, AI and rampancy - plus a catalog of primary sources. Every lore claim is verified and tagged by reliability: canon, datamine or theory.
What's actually going on
The year is 2893. More than a century ago, humanity sent a gigantic colony ship - the UESC Marathon - to the distant star Tau Ceti. The colonists arrived, founded the city of New Cascadia on the planet Tau Ceti IV, and things were going fine. Then the signal cut out. Over 30,000 people simply went silent. Forever.
Earth had no idea what happened. A rescue expedition took nearly a hundred years to get there and has only just arrived - to find a dead planet full of ruins, priceless technology, and something very wrong. Earth's government (the UESC) declared the entire system a restricted zone. Officially: quarantine. Unofficially: they have things to hide.
But wherever there's a forbidden zone full of treasure, someone will go in anyway. Megacorporations hire Runners - people whose minds have been digitized and loaded into synthetic bodies. Died? No problem, they'll print you a new body and pour you back in. You are one of these Runners. Welcome to Tau Ceti IV: grab the loot, run the corporate contracts, get out alive. And try not to think too hard about what actually killed the colony. Because it's still here.
Here is the extraction loop in short: you drop into a zone, loot it and run the contracts you took, fight off UESC forces, rival Runners and Anomaly-born things, and look for an exfil point. From there it forks in two: either you reach the exfil and walk out with your haul, or you die on the way and lose every piece of gear you brought into the raid. The stakes are simple and brutal: get the loot out and it is yours, die and you walk away with nothing.
How this guide separates fact from theory
Every lore claim in this guide is tagged with one of three labels. canon - confirmed by Bungie: in the game, the Codex or official materials. datamine - pulled by fans from the game's files: reliable, but never shown to the player in-game. theory - a fan theory or speculation: we flag it honestly, so guesses never pass for canon. When the sources contradict each other - we say so.
> Marathon is the name of the ship. A colossal colony vessel converted from Deimos, one of the moons of Mars. It carried the colonists here and still hangs in orbit above the planet - dead, dark, and full of secrets.
> Marathon is also a cult-classic 1994 shooter by the same studio, Bungie (the people behind Halo and Destiny). The new game is a reboot of that universe. More on that in sections 11 and 12.
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