Bungie Abruptly Cancels GDC Presentations on Marathon Testing and Networking Technologies

Both presentations were originally scheduled for March 13.

At the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2026, two technical sessions from Bungie developers regarding the creation and long-term support of the shooter Marathon have been abruptly canceled. According to the event’s official itinerary, both talks were slated to take place on March 13.

The first session was titled “Automating Marathon: How Bungie Went from 10 Automated Tests to Over 100 New, Reliable Tests to Deliver a High-Quality, Stable, Live-Service Game.” It was set to be hosted by Senior Automated Test Engineer Jon Walzli.

This presentation aimed to detail the evolution of automated testing frameworks within the Marathon project. The abstract noted that the engineering team had scaled their automated test suite from just 10 scripts to over 100 robust, reliable tests designed to ensure the stability and caliber of the live-service title.

The second scrapped talk, “High-Performance Gameplay Networking for Marathon,” was to be presented by Senior Engineer Alan Wiederman. It was intended to offer deep dives into the technical engineering behind the game’s high-performance network architecture.

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