Former Marathon game director Joe Ziegler praises Bungie‘s culture and explains how he handled disagreements over the extraction shooter’s direction.
Former Marathon game director Joe Ziegler has spoken positively about Bungie’s internal culture, describing the studio as “a very egoless company,” even as he revealed that the team behind its extraction shooter had disagreements over the game’s direction during development.
Ziegler hadn’t originally joined Bungie to work on Marathon. Former Pandemic Studios colleagues, including Justin Truman, recruited him, and he began working on an unnamed project. Then Marathon needed help. He moved over as an adviser and eventually took over as game director in March 2024.
His latest comments are more generous than that backstory might suggest.
Former Marathon Game Director Praises Bungie’s Culture and Willingness to Improve
In an new interview with PC Gamer, Ziegler talked about the weight Bungie carries because of Halo and Destiny, two of the franchises that drew him to the studio in the first place. Living up to that history puts considerable pressure on the developers. He also sees Bungie as a company willing to recognize when it needs help.
Ziegler said Bungie “lives in two worlds,” describing the pressure of its legacy alongside a culture that’s open to new perspectives. He explained that the studio regularly looks for ways to improve, sometimes by “bringing in people who are new” to help identify what its existing teams might be missing.
“I’ll say this about Bungie, which I really like, and it’s still very true about Bungie: it lives in two worlds,” Ziegler said. “One is this world where there’s a lot of legacy to live up to, which is a lot of pressure. But there’s also this other side of it, which is that it’s a very egoless company.
“In a lot of cases, they are always looking for some way to improve, and the way they do that is, oftentimes, by bringing in people who are new to help them figure out what they are missing.”
Marathon was a pretty good example of that approach. When Ziegler first became involved, the developers already had some ideas about where they wanted the game to go.
Other parts of the project were far less settled, with different opinions about its direction. His initial responsibility was to bring those ideas together and help the team agree on what it was trying to build.
Ziegler described the process as working with developers to find a cohesive direction, then helping them move forward once they’d agreed on it. He didn’t identify the specific disagreements or explain which parts of Marathon’s design were affected.
“So part of where I was advising was trying to bring those all together and be like, ‘Hey, what is the cohesive place you want to go to? And how do we get there?’ And then when we landed on that, I could help them drive that.”
Ziegler left Bungie after Marathon launched and is now working on an unannounced project.
In other news, Bungie recently announced that it’s pushing Marathon beyond its extraction shooter genre and that the upcoming Symbiosis December update will be the first step in that direction.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you excited to see the new direction Bungie is taking with Marathon where it’s expanding the game beyond its extraction shooter genre? Let us know in the comments below!
