As Bungie gets ready for the September 23 release of its PvPvE extraction shooter Marathon, the studio has found itself embroiled in a new controversy. A visual artist, going by Antireal, has taken to social media platform X accusing Bungie of stealing the artistic style and design elements from projects she had worked on back in 2017.
In her post, Antireal said, “the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017.” She went on to say that, while Bungie wasn’t obligated to offer her a job for her design work, the company outright stealing her ideas without appropriate attribution or compensation wasn’t a good thing.
“Bungie is of course not obligated to hire me when making a game that draws overwhelmingly from the same design language I have refined for the last decade, but clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution,” wrote Antireal.
“I don’t have the resources nor the energy to spare to pursue this legally but I have lost count of the number of times a major company has deemed it easier to pay a designer to imitate or steal my work than to write me an email.”
“In 10 years I have never made a consistent income from this work and I am tired of designers from huge companies moodboarding and parasitising my designs while I struggle to make a living.”
Antireal’s posts are accompanied by a host of images showcasing some of her work, which does bear a striking resemblance to the overall design language we’ve seen from the various trailers and artwork released for Marathon over the last couple of years. Some elements from Antireal’s art seem to be outright lifted and pasted into Marathon, including words like “Aleph” which feature prominently in the artist’s work.
In response, Bungie took to X to confirm that Antireal’s work was indeed seemingly used during the development of Marathon. However, the studio notes that this issue was unknown for its art team, and that it is taking investigating how this kind of slip up could happen. Bungie has referred to the use of Antireal’s work in Marathon’s textures an “unauthorised use of artist decals.”
“This issue was unknown by our existing art team, and we are still reviewing how this oversight occurred,” wrote the studio. “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.”
“As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission.”
Bungie has also said that, moving forward, it will be conducting a thorough review of its in-game assets to ensure that there are stricter checks to document artist contributions. “We value the creativity and dedication of all artists who contribute to our games, and we are committed to doing right by them,” it wrote. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
Marathon is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is currently undergoing playtests.