Before the weekend started, Bungie activated some mysterious terminals in its recently released extraction shooter Marathon. This kicked off an alternate reality game, and over the last 72+ hours, players and content creators across Twitch, Discord, Twitter, and Reddit have been working together to solve the puzzles with the hope that at the end of all this, Marathon’s final level will be unlocked.
On March 6, Bungie quietly activated previously offline computer terminals scattered around the first map in Marathon. These terminals looked and sounded like the ones found in Bungie’s original Marathon trilogy. And players quickly figured out that terminals led to other terminals, and if you visited them in the right order, you’d hear a message from an unknown voice that the community believes is Durandal, the psycho AI and main villain (?) from those older Marathon games. Intriguing!
👀 Durandal #Marathon
Credit: __meh pic.twitter.com/2BXVaTHiec
— Marathon Codec (@MarathonCodec) March 6, 2026
These terminals also led players to a website featuring scrambled camera feeds from a location named “Cyro Archive.” That’s the name of the previously announced “endgame” map of Marathon. Bungie later shared this website, and that’s when the online community puzzle-solving really began in earnest.
Players discovered that the different scrambled camera feeds on the Cryo Archive website had progress bars that changed every 15 minutes. But progress seemed to stall over the weekend, so Bungie dropped some hints in a new channel in the official Marathon Discord server. This helped guide players and creators to realize they would need to do a lot of terminal runs.
Eventually, players pieced together that if enough of them activated specific terminals on Marathon’s first map, Perimeter, during specific 15-minute intervals, they could fill the progress bars and unlock the cameras on the website, which led to more progress bars. Much of the effort to solve the puzzle has been organized by content creator and streamer MrRoflWaffles, who has even been able to even convince entire lobbies of Marathon players to chill out and work together to solve this ARG.
‼️NEW: FIRST LOOK AT CRYO ARCHIVE MAP LOCATIONS REVEALED VIA THE NEW ARG
– Cargo
– Control
– Index pic.twitter.com/0uNTr9IxeS— Marathon Bulletin (@TauCetiGG) March 9, 2026
At midnight on Sunday, players were able to unlock all the cameras on the Cyro Archive website. And now…the community waits for Bungie to activate the next step in the ARG puzzle. That is likely going to involve terminals activating on Marathon’s other maps, which will let players decode more of the website. According to dataminers, this is step three in a 13-step puzzle that is going to involve other websites, some of which have been found already, and more community cooperation.
The end result of all this hard work will (likely) be a new map to explore that will probably contain some big connections to the classic Marathon games. Plus, it will be a new place to get killed in a few minutes by some jerk with a sniper. And that’s fun.
