scandal

Last week Bungie was accused of using the designs of an independent artist, Antireal, without her knowledge or permission. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry case: elements of Marathon’s environment art unquestionably copy iconography from posters designed by Antireal in 2017. It didn’t help that several of the game’s art team also follow her accounts on social media.

Bungie issued a statement acknowledging the “unauthorised use” and blamed the situation on a former employee:

“We immediately investigated a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon and confirmed that a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game.

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“This issue was unknown by our existing art team, and we are still reviewing how this oversight occurred. We take matters like this very seriously. We have reached out to [Antireal] to discuss this issue and are committed to do right by the artist.”

That mea culpa was followed last Friday by a livestream in which game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross directly addressed the controversy, beginning with another prepared apology from Cross before the pair fielded questions. I will say upfront that this is in places uncomfortable viewing: Cross is clearly exhausted and looks miserable throughout. Regardless of how this plagiarism accusation plays out, and how Antireal is compensated, it is obvious these events have taken a considerable personal toll on Bungie’s staff.

The chat is largely oblivious to this and some viewers go straight for the jugular. Marathon’s tagline is “ESCAPE WILL MAKE ME GOD” which was co-opted during the stream and turned into the meme “PLAGIARISM WILL MAKE ME GOD”, which was spammed on repeat throughout, with minor variants.

Cross somehow manages to get through an hour of this, and gamely answers some of the most prominent audience questions. One of these is about how exactly Bungie will compensate Antireal and why it was scrubbing all the assets in question rather than employing the artist who made them.

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“For what it’s worth we’re confident the majority of the assets in that capacity are original, created internally by our internal artists,” says Cross. “We would love to work with Antireal if that’s an opportunity that presents itself: that’s part of what we sort of reached out to communicate.”

This is one of the elements of the plagiarism scandal that has gotten out of hand. Bungie has definitely incorporated some of Antireal’s iconography, and its feet should be held to the fire for that. But this has now ballooned into a baseless accusation from some that Marathon’s entire art style is plagiarised from this artist.

“At this point it’s a very small set of assets,” says Cross. “The decals themselves are the kind of details that are placed on the sides of buildings or crates or something like that so we absolutely do need to replace them and we would rule in any sort of way of doing that including contracting, collaborating or working with the artist for sure.”

“Something slipped through our net,” adds Ziegler. “So we have to go back and look at everything just to make sure that nothing else slipped through our net if that makes sense. Because it caught us by surprise and we want to make sure that we’re doing the right diligence to ensure it doesn’t happen again: so either way we’re going to scrub all the assets just because we want to make sure that we didn’t miss something else.”

Whatever else can be said about Bungie, and how these assets found their way into Marathon, it is at the very least holding up its hands. But there’s not much sympathy out there for the studio: probably because this is the fourth time this has happened in four years: last year fan art was used while designing a Destiny 2 Nerf gun; in 2023, an in-game Destiny 2 cutscene featured artwork copied from another artist; in 2021, Bungie admitted that fanart of Xivu Arath was “accidentally used” in a trailer for the Witch Queen.

(Image credit: Bungie)

The YouTube comments under the livestream are unforgiving. “You know, it’s telling that you used Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias in your cinematic, a poem that spoke of the fall of once great empires, lost to the sands of time,” says SunCityRebel. Other examples include: “I would write an original comment, but I don’t see any good ones to plagarize” and “art extraction shooter genre.”

Inevitably, there’s plenty more of that on the game’s subreddit, but also a little more empathy for the situation:

“I think it’s a good apology,” says Marikal. “You guys make it seem like this guy is an evil mastermind stealing stuff on purpose. What happened was some contractor working under him stole stuff back in 2020 and it slipped past him. Yes it is his responsibility, and so he is trying to make it right and fix it, but it’s not like he wanted this.”

This incident has taken place at a time where it feels like, for whatever reason, community sentiment has soured badly around Marathon. Despite a fantastic launch trailer and broadly positive responses from those who’ve played it, you don’t have to go far to find folk talking about how “cooked” the game / studio is, confidently predicting it’s going to fail, and making comparison to another Sony-published live service shooter: the catastrophe that was Concord.

Bungie was up against it with Marathon anyway: a plagiarism scandal in the runup to release was the last thing it needed. A new report claims morale at the studio is in “free fall.” Senior individuals like Cross have to carry the can, and that’s their job. But for the studio and the game’s sake, this situation needs an amicable resolution and a line drawn under it yesterday.

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