Former Bungie director thinks the term extraction shooter is 'so dumb' that he wanted to work with Marathon's marketing team to 'create a different genre name'

Image from Bungie's Marathon reboot. Not for use until after 12 April 2025, 11 PDT.

(Image credit: Bungie)

Bungie's next game, the troubled reboot of Marathon, is most easily described as an extraction shooter—currently the hottest genre on the planet due to the enormous success of Arc Raiders. But if one former Bungie developer had got his way, Marathon wouldn't be an extraction shooter. Not because he would have made the game differently, but because he hated the term so much, he wanted to change it.

Speaking on the Shooter Monthly podcast (via TheGamePost), Bungie's former director of product management Chris Sides said that he thought about collaborating with the studio's marketing team to come up with a different term for extraction shooters, one that presumably would have been pushed in the runup to Marathon's launch. The reason for this, Sides says, is the vagueness of the term.

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"It's why Arena Breakout and Tarkov, you can kind of look at those because they're both extraction shooters and they kind of fit the same mold. Comparing Arc Raiders to Tarkov just doesn't really fit. Comparing Arc Raiders to maybe like Rust could fit, and then Rust, it's that an extraction, because it's survival?"

Ultimately, Sides' issue is that "The genre doesn't even know what it is. You, as a player, how do you know what you're going to get?"

Personally, I'm not sure if Sides is correct when he says that extraction shooters are the only genre named after a mechanic. First-person shooters are at least partly named after their mechanics, for example, and you could make the case that stealth games are entirely named for their systems. In fact, is extraction even a mechanic in the same way that shooting or sneaking is? It basically just refers to leaving the map, after all.

However you slice it, this is why it's generally not a good idea to get too bogged down in what does or doesn't fit within a particular genre. Developers iterate upon existing game ideas and mechanics all the time, which is primarily how games evolve, so there's guaranteed to be some cross-pollination between genres, whatever they happen to be called.

Frankly, I think Bungie should be less concerned about whether it's making an extraction shooter, and more focused on whether it's making a good one. The Destiny 2 dev has run a gauntlet of delays, controversies and layoffs since the reboot was announced, while its parent company, Sony, is unhappy with its return on investment so far.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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