As you may know, Bungie went independent from Microsoft Game Studios a while back and left the Xbox-exclusive Halo franchise behind. Now some court documents relating to the new Activision partnership, have revealed four games Bungie’s been hired to develop. The most notable being Marathon 4!
Marathon 4 is set to continue on from the original Marathon Trilogy, which has recently been released in its entirety for free on the iOS App Store!
Progress on Marathon 4 will be slow since (at the moment at least) only 5% of Bungie’s (key) staff is working on it. The amount of Bungie employees that can work on Marathon 4 will go up slowly as they hit “cumulative profit goals” for Activision, as detailed in the contract.
And considering their first game for Activision – the sci-fi MMOFPS called Destiny – will be released as a Xbox 360 and “Xbox 720” timed exclusive (with a PS3 release following it), you can be sure Marathon 4 is at least three to many more years away. The four games are set to be released in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019.
As mentioned, while it’s unclear if Marathon 4 will be the second game Bungie is making, said second game is aimed at the Xbox 360, “Xbox 720”, PS4, and Windows PC audience. Although the contract notes that some of those platforms may be dropped if they decide they are not worthwhile or not technically feasible, reports Neogaf.
Here’s the Marathon Durandal XBLA trailer to give you a look at the 2nd game in the series.
The Marathon games are considered to be the spiritual predecessors to their Halo series, they are by some even said to be in the same universe.