By Dunke 
| Image: Bungie |
As if artificial intelligence scraping art from every corner of the internet isn’t bad enough already, genuine human plagiarism is ALSO still around. Some of it is malicious, sometimes folks just forget to cite a source, and in the case of Bungie you somehow ripped off the entirety of one artists style as one of their new game’s Unique Selling Points.
Imagine just walking about, living your life on a day. You’re just minding your business, making art in a style that you’ve spent years honing and crafting. Then all of a sudden, a major game developer announces their new sci-fi extraction shooter, with an art-style that looks… eerily familiar.
That’s exactly what happened to ANTIREAL – found under a funky username over on X – when they saw the reveal of Marathon. The upcoming shooter from the famed Halo and Destiny developer Bungie.
The studio was once a subsidiary to Microsoft that laid the groundworks for the popular Halo series before going independent, only to later be acquired by PlayStation brand owner Sony. What a wild twist of events. Bungie has spent its years of independence working on the popular MMO shooters Destiny, Destiny 2 and its expansions.
Seemingly as part of PlayStations – now foregone – strategy of pumping out as many live-service games – Hi Concord! – as possible got cracking at an extraction shooter that would become Marathon.
Buzz surrounding Marathon has been… hit and miss, so to say. Sony’s venture into the live-service scene has been nothing short of abysmal, with the company pulling the plug on the hero shooter Concord only two weeks after the title launched. Despite the fact that Bungie has been a revered studio for a long time, Marathon has definitely always felt like that one kid that just… is there. Left behind, but always following.
It isn’t particularly what people were looking for. But if there’s anyone who could reinvent the extraction genre to work on consoles, when the foundational titles like Escape From Tarkov have been stuck on pc for years, it’s Bungie right? After all, they brought the idea of first-person shooters on pc like Doom to consoles with Halo, and lifted the concept of a World of Warcraft-like MMO to a wider audience with Destiny as well. Who knows, maybe they’ll work their magic again.
Well, first reactions to the alpha-test in America were anything but positive. A big slap in the face for Bungie, but if it was any consolation: the design of the world and art-style used to give it a futuristic touch were pretty universally praised.
Until folks found out they stole basically all of that.
After the alpha, ANTIREAL took to X to call out Bungie for what (rightfully so) felt like plagiarism of their style. By their own saying, it has taken them ten years to refine it, and despite the design language inspiring lots of companies – they’ve struggled to make a living off of their art for years.
The images the artist provided compared design elements from their own artworks, which were evidently copied and pasted into Marathon without a single change. We have a saying for that I believe… it’s, uhh… oh yeah! really fucking scummy.
What makes the situation worse is that multiple members of the Bungie design team, including Art Director Joseph Cross, had been following ANTIREAL on X for years.
Bungie immediately issued a statement and apology, calling the whole thing a mistake made by an ex-designer. The tweet might make it seem like only a few design elements ended up in the game, but upon further investigation by players it was found that A LOT of Marathons environmental atmosphere had its roots in ANTIREALs work.
It’s not the first time this sort of thing happened at Bungie. Previous Destiny 2 trailers had been scrutinized by artists as well, for using fanart as bases without consulting or crediting the original creators. Fool me once, fool me twice… nope, fool me four times? You need to get your shit together.
The future of Marathon is unclear at the moment. The middling response to this alpha and the current fiasco has morale at Bungie plummeting (via Forbes) and fans are calling for the project to be cancelled, as to prevent another Concord-level fiasco.
What’s most important at the moment however, is that ANTIREAL gets compensated properly. Hopefully the fan backlash to this embarrassing ordeal makes companies do a few more takes when looking through the assets created for any project. Apologies aren’t enough anymore at this point.
And I was just getting excited to play Destiny again because of the upcoming Star Wars expansion… Welp, sorry Bungie. My money stays in the pocket to buy another copy of Chicken Riot with.
A silly goblin-like entertainment journalist with interest in anything fictional and even some non-fiction!