Veteran video game voice actor Elias Toufexis has spoken out about the online “hate” directed at Marathon, following developer Bungie’s decision to prioritize the game over Destiny 2.
Speaking to PC Gamer before last week’s shock news that Destiny 2 support will be completely wound down, Toufexis — who voices Marathon’s Assassin — acknowledged the perception among fans that Destiny 2 had suffered so Bungie’s extraction shooter could live.
“I understand Bungie made a game, Destiny 2, that people loved, and then they kind of were like, ‘We’re gonna put that on hold and we’re gonna work on Marathon,'” Toufexis said. “People got upset about that. Cool, don’t play Marathon. That’s fine, speak with your wallet, that’s fine.”
However, Toufexis continued by saying he disagreed with those whose critiques of Bungie and Marathon had turn into hate, spread by social media accounts posting constant negative content.
“Life is so short, man. Just stop tweeting memes under things for six hours,” Toufexis said. “Critique the game? Critique my work? Totally acceptable. But there’s people that go on Twitter and post memes: ‘This is Concord 2, this is Concord 2.’ Why are you spending hours doing this… How do you hope something fails?”
Here, Toufexis is of course referencing the high-profile PlayStation live-service shooter flop Concord that Sony released in 2024 and scrapped within a matter of weeks. There’s no suggestion that the same fate will meet Marathon in the near future — and indeed, Bungie’s decision to focus on it rather than Destiny 2 and begin developing PVE content suggests the game has its medium-term fate secured, even if concerns over layoffs and the studio’s overall future still linger.
Perhaps best known as the voice of Deus Ex protagonist Adam Jensen, Toufexis has voiced dozens of video game roles over the years, and held a couple of minor roles in Star Trek: Discovery. As with Discovery, Toufexis said that some of the backlash directed at Marathon had accused the game of being “DEI/woke” — something he also pushed back on.
“I was working on Marathon yesterday, and I was like, ‘Guys, tell me to stop engaging on X,’ because I keep engaging and I really shouldn’t,'” he said. “I saw some guy, I don’t want to get into specifics, but they’re just like, ‘I hope Bungie fails because of the woke leftist ideology.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m working with four white guys and two white women. I don’t understand this. Where are you getting this?’
“People just want to hate,” he concluded. “I don’t really understand it. It’s sad more than anything.”
As the dust settles on last week’s bombshell news for Destiny 2 fans, the franchise’s community has begun bidding their farewells to the franchise, as word surfaces that the “vast majority” of Bungie staff were reportedly unaware of plans to discontinue Destiny 2 support until the studio’s announcement was made public.
In the days since, fans have taken to the Marathon Steam page to make their frustrations clear by leaving negative reviews, even as others have begun combating these reviews through a positive countercampaign. And, of course, there’s an an online petition calling on Sony to greenlight the development of Destiny 3 — which now has more than 200,000 responses. Alas, there’s no sign of a future for Destiny yet in the works.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
