Bungie kicked off a series of “PlayMA” developer streams for Marathon last month, answering questions from the community while playing the game. The tone of the second entry in that stream series was a bit different in the wake of the revelation that the game’s alpha featured designs lifted from indie artist Antireal without pay.
“Our show’s a little bit different today,” game director Joe Ziegler explained at the beginning of the stream. “We had planned to show a lot more stuff, but for a lot of reasons we’re about to get into, we decided not to show a bunch of this stuff.”
With that in mind, the devs elected not to show any gameplay footage during the stream. “We had a bunch of stuff we wanted to show today, but we decided not to show it because we’re still scrubbing all of our assets to make sure that we are being respectful of the situation,” Ziegler explained.
While much of the stream was dedicated to discussing the game itself, franchise art director Joe Cross opened things with a prepared statement about the art.
“It came to our attention that an artist who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production took a number of graphic elements from a graphic designer, without permission or acknowledgement, and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in in 2020,” Cross said.
“The decal sheet included icons and text elements. These elements ended up in our alpha build. There is absolutely no excuse for this oversight and we are working on and 100% committed to our review process to ensure instances like this don’t happen again on Marathon or at Bungie.”
Cross said that Bungie has “reached out to Antireal, the artist in question, and followed up to ensure we do right by this artist.” No exact details on what Bungie intends to do were provided.
“I want to send my personal apology to Antireal, whose work was used in this case,” Cross concluded. “I know how unfair this feels, and we’re doing everything we can to make this right with her. Her work is fantastic and we clearly share mutual appreciation for a specific genre of graphic design. It’s very exciting and I’m excited to have folded that into our style in general. So thanks for listening and thanks for your patience.”
5 months from launch, Marathon devs keep evading pricing questions, but Bungie promises that “it’s definitely going to be a conversation.”
