Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced – New Game+-Modus angekündigt

Just four months after the release of Marathon, game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's leaving the game, and Bungie, effective today. His role will be filled by Del Chafe III, previously the assistant game director, who along with creative director Julia Nardin will "guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future."

"As for me, I'll be heading to something new, somewhere else, and will update you on where and what soon," Ziegler wrote on X. "I just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting me and Marathon in our windy mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen.

"The mission will continue in new and surprising ways so stay tuned for what this team has in store for you! It's been a pleasure seeing all the stories you've created, all the clever ways you've found ways to murder robots and one another. Hopefully as I move onto new things, you'll join me for those adventures as well."

Ziegler's departure, coming so soon after Marathon's release and while it's still struggling to find its footing, is a shock. Bungie is rolling out big changes to Marathon, including an embrace of PvE gameplay in the upcoming Vault Breaker mode, which will debut—temporarily—next week and then roll out in full sometime in season 3.

It's the worst possible time for instability at the top, in other words, particularly given that a turnaround for Marathon is essential. It isn't a Concord-esque disaster, but Marathon's concurrent player counts on Steam are nowhere near what Destiny 2 was (or is even currently) putting up, even when it was in its deepest doldrums.

With the studio gutted and no other releases imminent, Marathon is an existential game for Bungie. Even just as a matter of public perception, losing Ziegler—a highly-regarded developer who only joined Bungie in 2022 and took the reins on Marathon just two years ago—is a major blow: The more it looks like you're in a spiral, the tougher it is to pull out of it.

Compounding Bungie's troubles, Ziegler isn't the only high-profile Bungie employee to leave in recent weeks: Former Marathon design lead Lars Bakken, a storied Bungie developer in his own right, left in June after more than 20 years at the studio and is now "retired from the videogame industry."

Certain questions keep me awake at night. What is the purpose of consciousness? What will the world look like for our children? Which keyboard, exactly, is Samuel L Jackson's character in Jurassic Park using when he attempts to access the systems and prevent more dinosaur escapes?

Luckily, the last one now has an answer: it's the SGI Granite Keyboard (Indigo Style), of course! This fossilised piece of tech is listed on the website of Fabien Sanglard, someone who's taken it upon themselves to go through the original film and describe all the computers and related components in "excruciating detail."

God bless you, that's all I can say. Where else can I find the information that everyone's favourite super nerd, Dennis Nedry, primarily uses two Macs and one SGI Iris Crimson at his control room desk, alongside a Motorola Envoy personal digital assistant?

In fact, Sanglard has even brought some official reference material into the equation. Quoting from the book "The Making of Jurassic Park":

"Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. All told, $875,000 worth of computer hardware loaned by Silicon Graphics, $350,000 worth from Apple and some $500,000 in additional hardware and software went into equipping both the set and off-stage control room."

Now try this one on for size. The hurricane graphic seemingly operating in real-time on one of the computer screens was in fact created by Earthwatch, a piece of software developed for TV meteorologists. This trivia tidbit was revealed by an email from Gregory Gosson, who states:

"It was fantastic-looking stuff for the day, but the render times were very slow. The meteorologists would start the render sequence and then go to lunch. It could play the resulting animations in real-time, but could not render in real-time."

Next you'll be telling me the dinosaurs weren't real either.

Sanglard's dedication to the bit is impressive, as is the realisation that so much of the tech on screen appears to be authentic. I assumed at least one of the under-desk PCs was a spray-painted cardboard box, but apparently not.

One last fact before you go? The main control room screen has five machines underneath it, each with thousands of blinking red LEDs on the front. As Sanglard points out, given the massive loans of expensive computing hardware, these are quite possibly five genuine Thinking Machines CM-5 computers [PDF], priced at the time at $46,000 per unit.

Pretty rawr-some, no? Sorry, I had to. Please don't fire me, Dave [you're lucky, if it wasn't late on a Friday and I didn't mind dealing with the paperwork... -Ed.]