During the last weekend of February, Marathon — Bungie’s new extraction shooter and the studio’s next big project after Destiny — entered its Server Slam testing phase. This test is designed to test the stability of the game’s servers before launch.
Many players joined the test and quickly noticed something strange: the words “ARC Raiders” were censored in the in-game chat.
What Happened With the Chat Censorship
As shown in several shared videos, typing the name of Embark Studios’ game resulted in a line of hashtags, meaning the two words were completely blocked. However, players could still write “ARC,” “Raiders,” or even “ARCRaiders” without spaces. This made the censorship easy to bypass and seemed a bit pointless.
Interestingly, other game titles such as CS:GO, Fortnite, and Apex Legends were not censored in the chat.
The censorship was eventually removed, as confirmed by the official Marathon Development Team account on X. It is not clear what exactly happened, but it seems unlikely that it was a simple mistake.
One possible reason is that Bungie wanted to prevent players from mentioning ARC Raiders, which is currently one of its main competitors in the extraction shooter genre. However, after the censorship gained attention online, Bungie may have decided to remove it to avoid further criticism.
In any case, Marathon is set to launch on March 5. So far, the game has started strong on Steam, reaching over 140,000 concurrent players during the Server Slam test.
