Bungie Has Confirmed The Stealing of Art For Marathon

Bungie was accused of stealing artwork that became a major part of Marathon. Bungie has now confirmed that art was indeed stolen making it the third time that Bungie has been accused of stealing design. A post from the studio has confirmed the authenticity of the accusations.

In a post on X Antireal, who is a visual artist showed multiple designs that were used in Marathon Alpha without her consent. The alpha of Marathon shows us the environment that is full of assets taken from the poster design being shared.

The seminaries here are not subtle but rather straightforward copy-paste that were used in multiple areas of the game. The plagiarism is so blatant that even the designer’s logo was copied.

In the post on X Antireal states “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,” she further continued in the second post “But clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution.”

A user also noted that the art director, Joseph Cross, follows her on X. Just a few hours after the MarathonDevTeam confirmed “unauthorized” usage of the artist’s designs.

MarathonDevTeam further stated in a follow-up post, “We immediately investigated a concern regarding the 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.”

Not The First Time

Bungie has now launched an internal investigation to look into the issue. The dev team further stated in another post, “As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission,” MarathonDevTeam account, while confirming it stated that “former Bungie artist” was the reason for the whole situation.

This is not the first time that Bungie has been accused of stealing design. In 2023, the developer was accused of art usage designs in Destiny 2 of an artist in some of its cutscenes. Bungie then reached out to the artist and issued an apology. In 2024, the developer confirmed that the artwork of a fan was used to create Destiny’s official Nerf gun.

With these constant mistakes, it seems like it is becoming harder to shrug off these incidents as petty issues rather than a main problem with the developer.