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Elias Toufexis, a prolific actor known for playing Adam Jensen in the Deus Ex series, is having a hard time staying on social media site X, formerly Twitter, while doing VA work for Bungie's new FPS, Marathon.
It's no secret that engaging with random people on social media is almost never a pleasant or fruitful experience, but navigating those virtual minefields is all the more harrowing when your professional work is the subject of some of those, ahem, discussions. Believe you me, I know this as well as anyone as a full-time games journalist in the year of our lord, 2026. Toufexis is similarly social media-weary as the voice behind the Assassin class in Marathon, a game currently in the throes of controversy for a number of reasons, chiefly the perception by some that it's to blame for the ending of active development on Destiny 2.
Talking to PC Gamer during GDC, Toufexis says the noise is loud enough that he intends to stay away from X, or Twitter, maybe permanently.
"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, aiming his ire not toward level-headed critiques of his work but toward misdirected vitriol. "I saw some guy like, 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?'"
Destiny 2 has been on something of a downswing for years now following numerous missteps that correlated with a steady decline in players since 2023's Lightfall expansion, despite a short-lived rebound in 2024 with The Final Shape. Regardless, it seems Toufexis is hearing from plenty of Destiny 2 diehards who saw the game's downfall and immediately turned to point accusatory fingers at Marathon, Bungie's shiny new extraction shooter.
"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.' People got upset about that. Cool, don't play Marathon. That's fine, speak with your wallet, that's fine," says Toufexis. Still, he says there's a right and wrong way to voice frustration over stuff like this, and he draws a line between honest criticism and straight-up hoping for a game to fail.
After all, "Life is so short, man. Just stop tweeting memes under things for six hours," he says. "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?"
Unfortunately, Toufexis is fighting back against an age-old tradition of Shitposting Through It that I have a hard time believing is ending any time soon. Thankfully, it sounds like he's already realized the best strategy here is to simply not engage.
