Marathon May Come to Last-Gen Xbox and PlayStation Consoles

Marathon recently had quite a successful server slam weekend, drawing in nearly 150,000 players at one point on Steam alone. In the hours since its March 5 launch, it has consistently played host to around 80,000 concurrent players, showing that it wasn’t just the free test drawing players into the new extraction shooter. However, it seems as though Bungie wants to include as many gamers in the fun as possible, according to the game’s ESRB rating, which has recently been updated to include both the Xbox One and PlayStation 5 in addition to the previous ratings for PC, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5 platforms.

Bungie has not confirmed whether it is planning to bring Marathon to older systems, but it’s curious nonetheless that the game would receive a dedicated rating for last-gen consoles, especially since older games that launched on last-gen consoles but have since become playable on new consoles, like Destiny 2, have not been updated at the ESRB to include newer console generations in their ratings. Marathon’s minimum hardware requirements for PC are far from high-end, calling for just an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT and an Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 with 8 GB of RAM. The PS4, for its part, is powered by an AMD GCN 1.1.0 GPU with 1152 shading units, coming in at around 1.843 TFLOPS theoretical performance, which is substantially lower than the GTX 1050 Ti’s 2.183 TFLOPS, but given the nature of tailored console hardware, it wouldn’t be surprising if it could be run smoothly on the aging hardware. However, it has been reported that Marathon runs fairly well on Windows gaming handhelds, so it may be technically possible to get the game running on older consoles if the development team decides to put in the work.