Marathon sleuths solve the first step of an elaborate ARG to unlock its challenging new map

Prior to launch, Bungie was very cryptic about how we would access Cryo Archive, Marathon's upcoming, challenging fourth map that will be a lucrative but high-stakes zone. We know that it's set aboard the actual Marathon ship, which floats abandoned above the planet of Tau Ceti IV, and that it holds some big secrets as to what happened to the colony on board - and the UESC's real game plan. We also know it'll provide a tough survival experience where you'll need extremely good gear. However, Cryo Archive was merely given a rough 'mid March' window in Bungie's Marathon roadmap, and it's up to the community to unlock it. Well, we've just got one big step closer, as the first stage of an ARG has been completed, and it also provides some more glimpses of this intimidating map.

Over the weekend, players noticed several green terminals that they could interact with on Marathon's Perimeter map. It also quickly became clear that these terminals came in pairs, and by visiting both within the space of the same match, you would trigger dialog from a mysterious voice. This is widely speculated to be that of Durandal, the AI that controlled the Marathon ship in Bungie's original trilogy of FPS games. Matching up the correct terminals also causes some brief surveillance footage of Cryo Archive to play on the screens, plus a sequence of numbers that, when decoded using the 'A = 1' method reveals the phrase "Go, dear violent one, to what once was home, but now lies haunted." That's a clear reference to the Marathon ship, if you ask me.

However, this turns out to be more than an easter egg. As sleuths such as YouTuber 'MrRofflWaffles' have found, there's a connection between the terminals and a website for 'Cryoarchive Systems,' which displayed several surveillance feeds with broken signals. Matching up the terminals in the game actually granted progress towards loading bars on some of these surveillance feeds, so the community was trying to link as many of them up as possible in order to restore the surveillance footage.

Lo and behold, they've only gone and done it. If you go to the ARG's website now, you'll see three of the feeds are now 'stable' and viewable, correlating to the three pairs of terminals on Perimeter. These show glimpses of Cryo Archive. It also appears the map will have nine separate points of interest - the nine screens on the website are numbered and some have now been given names such as Cargo, Biostock, and Steerage.

At the time of writing, there are still six unstable feeds, two of which are unnamed, and the community's currently scrambling to figure out how to make them stable like the initial three. No loading bars are showing yet, so it could be that Bungie hasn't enabled the next method in-game yet, or simply that a different kind of task is required.

The prospect of boarding the Marathon ship was already a mysterious and enticing one - this ARG is only helping boost the excitement to get on board. While we've seen short snippets of Cryo Archive in pre-launch developer videos from Bungie, this website shows off a few new sections and angles, seemingly with a few more to come. Part of me wants the community's best minds to get this one cranked as soon as possible so we can finally set foot in Cryo Archive - another part of me hopes they take their time, because my gear is nowhere near good enough yet…