At the second MacWorld show that year, this time in Boston, Bungie demonstrates the greatly revamped Marathon game, with a graphics engine rewritten since earlier in the year and an entirely new plotline.

Bungie supposedly tells showgoers that the game will ship "in two weeks" according to the Marathon Scrapbook, saying they were waiting only on the boxes.

In fact, the game was not quite done. Every single solo map ended up getting re-done, and Marathon would not end up shipping until near the end of the year, leading to the now-famous Bungie policy of not announcing release dates, a policy that would stand until the company was purchased by Microsoft and the release date for Halo was locked in place to be a launch title for the Xbox in November of 2001.

The no-release-date policy constantly caused conflict with Bungie fans who preordered from mail-order houses, required by law to provide release dates when taking preorders, a topic Matt Soell addressed in a Bungie Soapbox piece in October of 1996, which can still be seen on the Bungie.net site today.