In an astonishing display of perseverance, Bungie's unfinished, poorly-received, and ultimately delayed escape shooter Marathon has finally surfaced and will now enter closed beta after months of seemingly being dead.

Before announcing the test, which is scheduled to run from October 22 to October 27, developer Bungie had been strategically silent on the fate of Marathon.For at least the fourth time in its history, the developer has been accused of plagiarizing another artist's work, and later admitted to accidentally making the mistake with Marathon; the incident was reportedly a blow to morale on the team's reboot of the 1994 shooter of the same name.

With this in mind, Bungie’s announcement that registration for the “Marathon” technical test has opened does not sound like a sense of victory, but rather a bit of reluctance.The developer said objectively and calmly: "This is an important node for us - we will use it to test various improvements after the alpha test, including three maps, five Rogue shells, close voice chat, adjusted combat rhythm, single-player match queue, deeper environmental narrative, etc."

“Nevertheless, the technical test version is still in development and only contains a portion of the content planned for the official version of Marathon, focusing on early player experience,” Bungie continued. “In the months after the closed technical test ends, we will release a public update on the development progress of Marathon!”

To participate in this closed beta, players need to be in Europe or North America and have at least one PS5, Xbox Series S console, or a computer equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card.I believe patience will pay off as well.