Players have rallied together to solve the first stage of Marathon's elaborate Cryo Archive ARG puzzle, and it's revealed some creepy footage of the next map

Bungie's been hyping up Marathon's post-launch end-game Cryo Archives map for a long time now, promising intense encounters and puzzle-solving. It feels to me very much like Destiny 1's 'Vault of Glass moment', where everything clicks into place and Bungie's vision becomes clear. That's the hope, at least; it's hard to see how neatly this type of content can fit into an extraction shooter.

But it's not been as simple as just waiting for a specific date on the Marathon roadmap to roll around. No, Bungie's been putting us all to the test with an ARG—a community-wide puzzle. At least it's caused some players to put their guns down and team up instead, though friendly lobbies aren't impossible to come by even outside of this collective effort.

This began when the small wall terminals you might have seen across the maps started turning on in the Perimeter map. Activating these terminals in certain orders gave us some audio messages from rogue AI Durandal but, more importantly, cyphers which unlocked the mysterious Cryoarchives Systems website.

This website had a bunch of broken video feeds from aboard the Marathon ship, where the Cryo Archives map will take place. Over the past day or so, the ARG community mobilised, rallying together to clean up the video feeds after figuring out that hordes of players needed to interact with the Perimeter terminals in a specific order within 15-minute intervals.

With that done, we've completed the first stage of the ARG and are either waiting for Bungie to activate what's next or for players much craftier than I to figure something out. For example, we know the Cryoarchives Systems website is also tracking the community's total number of UESC kills, so perhaps that'll be important.

This has given us a few of the clean, glitch-free video feeds aboard the Marathon, and they're pretty spooky:

It's the Control Room feed that's caught my attention the most. Pay close attention, and six seconds in, you'll see what looks like a ghostly figure pass under the walkway on the far right. I've no clue what this actually is, but I don't think I want to find out. As far as we know in the lore, the Marathon ship mysteriously went dark, and it looks as though the S'pht, a cybernetically enhanced alien race, has commandeered it. It's a ghostship, as far as humans are concerned.

Presumably, we'll have to repeat a similar process with the remaining terminals on Dire Marsh and Outpost, but those aren't active in-game as of writing, so we're at an impasse.