Marathon launch times and release date

After a less-than-ideal early reception last year, Bungie made the call to indefinitely delay Marathon while it returned to the drawing board somewhat. Now, it’s officially back on the menu, and the Marathon launch time is drawing near.

But release is far from the end of Bungie’s plans for Marathon, as it unveiled Season 1: Death is the First Step and gave us a look at what’s to come later on in the roadmap. Controversially, it’s also locked in mandatory server wipes roughly every three months, so don’t get too precious about any loot you find at launch.

Below, I’ll go over the Marathon launch times in major regions, whether you can preload the game to start looting Tau Ceti from the moment the lights turn green, and the system requirements.

When is the Marathon unlock time?

Marathon releases on Thursday, March 5, at 6 pm UTC, on Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. This works out as the following times in each region:

US Pacific: 10 am PST, March 5US Eastern: 1 pm EST, March 5UK: 6 pm GMT, March 5Central Europe: 7 pm CET, March 5Australia: 5 am AEDT, March 6New Zealand: 7 am NZDT, March 6

This comes just over three days after the end of the Server Slam, where we all had the opportunity to give Bungie’s extraction shooter a test run. Bungie has taken a lot of the feedback on board and has even given us some interesting player stats, like how we extracted 145,822 cases of Premium Tick Milk and a whopping 384,866 Drinkable Cheeseburgers, for some reason.

Is there preloading for Marathon?

(Image credit: Bungie)

Yes, you can currently preload Marathon on all platforms if you’ve pre-ordered the game. Note that on PC, you’ll need roughly double the game’s overall size to be able to preload and decrypt the files on launch day—if you don’t have space, just download it at launch. Marathon’s only around 25 GB across all platforms, so it shouldn’t take too long to download anyhow.