Bungie’s much anticipated video game Marathon launches with a ground-breaking, universe-building marketing campaign from creative agency Kurppa Hosk

Marathon, the eagerly awaited multiplayer title from AAA video game studio Bungie, the creators of Halo and Destiny, recently launched with immediate impact. Supported by a breakthrough go to market campaign from Kurppa Hosk, the game reached #2 Global Top Seller and #1 US Top Seller on Steam pre launch, surpassed 100,000 concurrent players within 30 minutes, and trended across major streaming platforms.

The creative agency partnered closely with Bungie to craft an immersive, universe-building campaign that bridged in-game experiences with real-world interactions, seamlessly integrated marketing, world-building and community engagement. The approach not only built excitement for launch, but established the foundation for a long-term brand universe in constant dialogue with its players.

A new standard for entertainment marketing

Marathon returns to the 1994 franchise, reimagined as a live service PvPvE (Player vs Player vs Environment) survival extraction FPS set on the planet Tau Ceti IV. Players assume the role of a cybernetic mercenary (“runner”) for hire, competing on behalf of corporate factions as they trespass across deserted research facilities, hostile landscapes and dynamic threats. The game’s survival tension, fast-paced PvP action, worldbuilding and narrative will bring the extraction FPS genre to a broader audience.

Launching a game of this scale required more than awareness, it demanded a marketing campaign that resonates culturally and emotionally, evolves with the product, audience sentiment, and builds from a deep understanding of the in-game universe. Since the campaign’s early days in April 2025, the brand-led product marketing approach ensured each touchpoint and activation expanded the universe and made it tangible before release – honouring the IP while inviting new audiences in.

Nick Clifford, Principal Marketing Manager, says: “We believe in being community first in all our marketing. That’s why it’s critical for us to take a brand-led approach that fosters joy and belief within our core fans. Partnering with the team at Kurppa Hosk allowed us to bring so much of the game world to life in a way that feels novel and forward facing, while preserving our Bungie roots and ethos.”

A long-term creative partnership

Kurppa Hosk’s collaboration with Bungie began in 2021, initially focusing on the visual aesthetic of the Marathon game world, including the creation of fidelity graphics, worldbuilding iconography and faction brand identities. The collaboration has since grown into a long-term creative partnership, in which Kurppa Hosk supported all stages of the product development lifecycle. As part of the wider Eidra consultancy collective, Kurppa Hosk brought all its strategy, design and communications expertise to Marathon, while leveraging Eidra specialisms in technology, engineering, industrial design and physical production.

As lead agency partner, Kurppa Hosk worked closely with Bungie to define the marketing campaign’s strategic vision and aesthetic identity, collaborating on the comprehensive GTM roadmap for release. The work spanned brand strategy, visual identities, always-on social and game capture, paid media strategy and creative asset production, and the design of community environments and experiential activations – all built as narrative spaces in their own right.

Leo Drakenberg, Creative Director at Kurppa Hosk, says: “Modern marketing – especially within the gaming industry – requires cultural fluency, speed and the ability to orchestrate product, brand and community as one living ecosystem. Working with Bungie from the early stages of creative expression and world‑building all the way through to the final phases of the marketing campaign and community engagement has given us a deep understanding of the brand and its universe, helping ensure every element was connected, interlinked and, most importantly, engaging for audiences.”

A holistic campaign approach – bringing the in-game world to life

Putting fan immersion first – and collapsing the boundaries between marketing, world-building and player participation – has been a deliberate strategy since day one. And it has proven effective.

The campaign kicked off with a high-impact gameplay reveal in April 2025, setting the stage for a series of experiential activations blurring the lines between in-game and reality. Tapping into Bungie’s legacy of ambitious Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Kurppa Hosk designed and developing one of the studio’s most extensive to date, a multi-day experience built around a web of interconnected puzzles.

To deepen player engagement, Kurppa Hosk built a Discord server that featured first-of-its-kind personal identification, allowing individual participants to be accurately tracked and rewarded for their progress in real time. The innovation helped making Marathon’s Discord become the largest ever for an unreleased game, growing to over 400,000 members during the early reveal period.

At the heart of these efforts was a broader ambition: what Kurppa Hosk describes as “designing the desire to play.” For a live-service title where brand and product are inseparable, the challenge was to build emotional connection, anticipation and a clear understanding of the game’s core propositions before players could experience it themselves. A dedicated game capture team played a key role in this effort, producing cinematic and authentic content from the game for social and paid media that translated gameplay into immersive and visceral storytelling compelling enough to rally fans and win over sceptics.

This approach to blur the in-game narrative and the real-world extended beyond owned and paid channels. Ahead of launch, a fake showroom for one of the game’s factions was created together with Whoisthebaldguy and presented as a showcase for consciousness transfer into “shells,” before ultimately being revealed as a surprise prank video for fans. Kurppa Hosk and Bungie also collaborated with creators (through both organic and paid partnerships) and developed innovative merchandise to create engaging in-roads for wider audiences. Pulling from distinctive in-game elements (such as the 2x Drinkable Cheeseburger and Bingus, the pink cybernetic cat), the products established and fueled a shared language in the community, while reinforcing the commitment to grow from and feed back into culture.

Oscar Merry, Client Director at Kurppa Hosk, adds “The most successful live-service games create culture, which then becomes part of future seasons of the game. This creates a virtuous circle where real-world moments feed back into the product. This campaign sets a new benchmark for the category, with a holistic approach that is essential for all brands in the modern marketing landscape.”

Kurppa Hosk is now focusing its efforts on supporting Bungie throughout the next phases of Marathon’s lifecycle: “The launch of the game is a major milestone – but never the end of the process. Our ambition with Marathon, and our ongoing collaboration with Bungie, is focused on sustaining a living ecosystem where brand, product and player culture continuously shape one another,” concludes Merry.