Bungie pulls Marathon gameplay after art plagiarism storm, and say it’s reviewing all art

Bungie pulled all Marathon gameplay from its latest live stream on Friday, while it said it reviews and removes artwork that one of its former artists took without permission.

Earlier this week, Scottish artist Fern ‘4nt1r34l’ Hook accused Bungie of taking assets from her previous work and using it in the alpha for Marathon. Bungie later acknowledged that Hook’s claims were accurate, and claimed that a former staff member was responsible for taking her art.

On Friday, the developer kicked off its weekly Marathon live stream in sombre fashion, first announcing that it would not have any gameplay, due to the ongoing investigation into the lifted artwork.

Joseph Cross, Marathon’s art director, then claimed Bungie was conducting a thorough review process to remove any art from the game that was “inappropriately sourced” and ensure that the situation doesn’t happen again in the future.

Cross claimed that Bungie had reached out to Fern Hook to apologize and make sure they “do right” by her, though no specific details were shared on how it plans to do so.

“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 then placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in in 2020,” Cross said.

“The decal sheet included icon and text elements, which ended up in our alpha build. There’s absolutely no excuse for this oversight, and we are working on and are 100% committed to a review process to ensure that instances like this don’t happen again at Bungie.”

Cross claimed that, over the last 24 hours, he had reached out to Fern Hook, and was auditing all work done by the former Bungie artist responsible, and that it would remove anything deemed “questionably or inappropriately sourced”.

“Hundreds of artists have worked on this project for years, internally and externally, and we share many influences, including modernism, 2000s style vector art, cyberpunk, and of course the original Marathon trilogy,” he said.

“Our style is a result of all of those inspirations, and it’s worth noting that none of our external partners who have worked on branding or any part of the visual design of the game were designed with this situation.

“Lastly, personally I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for artists working independently, producing, making a living, doing commercial or fine art. We’ve worked with many of them. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job, to make those connections, create content, and collaborate.

“So to that extent, I want to send my personal apology to 4nt1r34l, whose work was used in this case. I know how unfair this feels, and we’re doing everything we can to make this right. Her work is fantastic, and we clearly share a mutual appreciation for a specific genre of graphic design, and I’m excited to have folded that into our style in general.”

Marathon is set for release on September 23 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC. Bungie has confirmed that the game will be a “premium product”, though the studio has yet to confirm the price.