What Marathon’s creepy moth loading screen means, according to Bungie

Creative director Julia Nardin unpacks the deeper meaning of the haunting clip

The first time I geared up for a run during the Marathon server slam on Feb. 27 with two friends I used to play Destiny with, we all admitted to being disoriented. The extraction shooter’s UI throws a lot at you all at once, and the visuals feel like a cyberpunk nightmarescape full of glitchy, unsettling imagery. Perhaps the most potent symbol that lingers is a jarring video clip of a moth chowing down on some wires that plays as you load into each new run.

“Do you think that’s meant to reference the story of the first-ever computer bug where it was just a moth eating a wire?” one of my teammates, a software engineer, asked. I had never heard of this tale before, but sure enough, it’s true: On Sept. 9, 1947, a team of computer scientists found a moth trapped between relay contacts in the Harvard Mark II computer — which occupied about 4,000 square feet of floor space. One team member logged it as the “first actual case of a bug being found.” Though Thomas Edison first coined the term “bug” for a malfunction within a technical system long before, it was this incident — and how often programmer Grace Hopper talked about it in her many public lectures — that popularized terms like “debugging” and “bugs” as related to computer malfunctions.

In a game about glitchy software where the core premise involves disembodied consciousnesses transferring into cloned shells to fight repeatedly on a distant colony in space, a moth eating a wire seemed spot-on. Did developer Bungie intentionally reference the first actual case of a bug being found?

“I wish I could say yes, because that’s really cool,” Marathon creative director Julia Nardin told Polygon via email. “Thematically, moths represent death, transformation, and rebirth — and there’s a lot of that in Marathon. If you want to go a little deeper, the shells that players inhabit are constructed by WEAVEworms, which are the future of 3D printing technology in our universe.”

Nardin confirmed that this particular loading screen is a “sense-memory” or “sense-mem” that plays on a loop. “In-universe, they’re a sort of manufactured dream that focuses the Runner’s mind during their transition,” she said. “They’re abstract by design so players can connect more deeply with the feelings they evoke, whatever they may be.”

The WEAVEworms, Nardin said, are loosely based on real-world silkworms which produce a liquid protein from their head that hardens when exposed to air. To build its cocoon, a silkworm will release a continuous thread of silk up to 3,000 feet long and then undergo metamorphosis to become a silk moth. China began domesticating silkworms 5,000 years ago to, you guessed it, harvest the cocoons to make silk. Over time, humans selected traits to maximize silk production, breeding the silkworms that produced longer silk filaments and bigger cocoons. The resulting moths, however, have become so fat with such weak wings that they can’t even fly.

“Having it be a sense-mem is almost aspirational, like a pre-programmed promise that you’ll eventually transcend beyond who or what you are,” Nardin said. “It’s a rare thing for a silkworm to become a silk moth. We humans boil them alive in their cocoons to harvest their silk. I’m not sure the megacorps of Marathon treat WEAVEworms or Runners much better.”

What exactly is the moth doing in the loading screen? Is it eating the wire? Creating something? Transforming in some way? “That depends,” Nardin said. “What resonates most with you?” The moth sequence was originally built by Antibody as part of the game’s longer intro cinematic that plays before each person’s first run, but then Bungie’s team adapted sections of it to develop the standard loading experience. During the server slam, it felt provocative but eventually repetitive. Nardin confirmed that while the worms and moths won’t disappear altogether, we can safely expect more cryptic symbolism from loading screens as the game’s broader story unfolds.

“This is an area that we plan to continue to develop based on how the world evolves and the identity that our community constructs for itself over time,” she said. “Live service games are a shared experience, and it’s important to us that aspects of the creative accurately reflect this. We’re really enjoying all the moth memes in the meantime, though.”