Bungie has confirmed that their game Marathon plagiarized some art assets after a quick investigation.
The artist whose work was stolen, who goes by 4nt1r34l on Twitter, made this statement on the website a few hours ago:
the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs i made in 2017.
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.
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.
4nt1r34l attached pictures on her tweets to prove the plagiarism and tagged the Twitter accounts of Bungie and Bungie’s franchise director, Joseph Cross.
In a matter of hours, the official Marathon developer team Twitter account shared this statement:
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.
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 @4nt1r34l 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.
To prevent similar issues in the future, we are conducting a thorough review of our in-game assets, specifically those done by the former Bungie artist, and implementing stricter checks to document all 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. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
As a funny aside, 4nt1r34l inserted a pretty infamous meme into one of her art pieces so that she could trace and prove that her art would be stolen. True enough, this meme also came up in Marathon itself, though we don’t know if you could have seen this in the trailers and other videos.
We applaud Bungie for their prompt response, and for rightly siding with the artist after finding proof it really happened. We’re hopeful this raises 4nt1r34l’s profile enough so that she can be treated with respect and be properly employed and compensated by the video game industry for her work in the future.
It goes without saying, but after the turmoil that’s played out in public and private in the past few years, Bungie did not need to deal with another issue. That’s probably the reason they moved so promptly to nip this one in the bud.
