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Marathon Brand Identity: How Kurppa Hosk Built a Universe
The Marathon brand identity, crafted by Kurppa Hosk, exemplifies a modern approach to brand strategy that integrates world-building and community engagement into a cohesive ecosystem. By blurring the lines between in-game fiction and real-world experiences, Bungie has created a living brand identity that fosters deep player investment and cultural relevance, setting a new standard for game marketing.
Abduzeedo: Marathon Brand Identity: How Kurppa Hosk Built a Universe jeff March 21, 2026 Marathon brand identity by Kurppa Hosk spans four years of world-building, faction design, and community systems that made Bungie's game a Steam chart-topper. When Bungie set out to revive Marathon — the 1994 cult shooter that predated Halo, the studio understood that launching a live-service extraction game in 2026 demanded more than traditional marketing. It required a complete creative ecosystem. That responsibility fell to Stockholm-based agency Kurppa Hosk, which began its collaboration with Bungie in 2021, nearly four years before the March 5 launch date.
The scope of the Marathon brand identity project was rare by any measure. Kurppa Hosk started at the visual foundation: fidelity graphics, worldbuilding iconography, and faction brand identities for the game's warring factions inhabiting the derelict colony of Tau Ceti IV. Every element had to serve both the in-game fiction and the real-world brand, collapsing the boundary between product and world.
Marathon Brand Identity From World-Building to Launch Campaign The creative work eventually expanded into a full marketing partnership covering brand strategy, visual identities, social media asset production, paid media strategy, community environment design, and experiential activations. The Marathon brand identity system had to operate simultaneously across a game interface, a merch line, a Discord server with 400,000 members, and real-world pop-up experiences that blurred in-game fiction with physical space.
A multi-day experiential activation built around interconnected puzzles asked participants to physically trace narrative threads from the game into the real world. Kurppa Hosk engineered a Discord server using first-of-its-kind personal identification technology, allowing individual participants to be tracked and rewarded in real time for their puzzle progress. The result was the largest Discord server ever built for an unreleased game.
Creative director Leo Drakenberg described the approach as requiring "cultural fluency, speed and the ability to orchestrate product, brand and community as one living ecosystem." The Marathon brand identity was never meant to be a campaign with a start and end date. It was designed from the ground up as a living system, one capable of absorbing new seasons, zone changes, and narrative expansions without losing visual coherence.
Designing the Desire to Play Kurppa Hosk framed the campaign's central ambition as "designing the desire to play." Before any player could drop into Tau Ceti IV, Bungie and Kurppa Hosk wanted them to already feel invested in its factions, its aesthetic, its tension. To achieve that, a dedicated game capture team produced cinematic content for social and paid media that prioritized storytelling over spectacle, a deliberate counter to the trailer-heavy noise of the games marketing landscape. The Marathon merch line extended the brand identity into physical form.
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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort in the gaming industry that introduces innovative strategies for brand engagement, making it highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.