Bungie appears to have extensively plagiarized an artist's work in their extraction shooter "Marathon" according to this Bluesky post
BILLAIN (@billain.bsky.social)
Bungie has issued an official statement, they are throwing an artist under the bus and pledging to make it right with the original artist.
This is a developing story.
Why did they have to copy anything?!
BUNGIE LITERALLY ALREADY MADE MARATHON
This new game has essentially no relation besides name and logo to the old Marathon games. Sadly, because the old ones were the shit.
Calling this a Marathon game makes no sense, and I don't just mean aesthetically. The business case can't possibly be there, either.
Anyone who has a nostalgic attachment to Marathon (👋) won't be interested in this new game, and anyone interested in this new game probably doesn't care about the name "Marathon."
On top of that, there's the fact that Marathon kind of looked like Halo. When Bungie made Halo, they were clearly taking after their own art style from their previous games. Which means Bungie could have announced that they're making a singleplayer first person shooter that kind of looks like Halo. Everyone would have lost their minds. Instead, they announced yet another live service game, and no one is interested.
Well now I’m not buying it.
Its worse than that: this game is somehow CANON with the original Marathon
It's hilariously awful because, as a fan of the original Marathon trilogy, the aesthetic of the new game is the only thing that appealed to me; and it was stolen.
I have no interest in an extraction shooter. You can make an extraction shooter if you want, but you gotta make something that players can get emotionally invested in first. Original Marathon players won't recognize this and new players won't care so what was the fucking point of any of this, I'm going crazy. This industry has lost all direction
They did steal artwork, but the whole aesthetic wasn't stolen... the stuff they stole is a very small part of the game (I'm pretty sure, haven't and won't play it). I'm in no way defending them, but saying the whole aesthetic was stolen just because they used some text and icons from someone istället just dumb.
I'm just spitballing, but the ip owner needs to do something with the ip so they can keep it? IIRC similar things have been mentioned here and there when some long forgotten ip suddenly gets a new loweffort installment.
So, could be that they were making the extraction shooty anyway, so they slapped Marathon on it "just to refresh the timer"? I dunno if that's how it works, not a lawyer.
I played the original games, on a Performa 6100 Mac, back in the day!
Look at you with your fancy PowerPC model. We had to make do with a 68040 and we liked it!
goes outside to yell at the clouds to get off of his lawn
Yeah but that Marathon was innovative, looked good, and was fun to play. That would never work in this day and age. Also I think the only thing that same about the two is the name.
Legit, i only clicked this because i was "wait wtf? system 7 marathon??"
They just trained their employees using other people’s copyrighted works. What’s the problem?
The implication that generative AI would spit out pixel-for-pixel copies from its training data is flat out wrong. Even generative AI would have made more original assets than what Bungie put in Marathon. The worst part is that this is like the 4th time they've been caught doing this.
Being inspired by an art style and using that style is fine, and completely normal. Thats how art works. But copying and pasting 1 for 1 is not fine.
There's nothing wrong with inspiration (attribution is nice), but what's evident is they straight up LIFTED parts of antireal's art into in-game assets.
This is something Sam Altman would say
The lead art director of marathon has followed her since before the game began development and he still stole her shit wholesale. Disgusting.
Bungie had similar problems with Destiny 2, if I remember correctly.
Bungie commented on the current issue an hour ago.
Love the response. Very CYA and they're called out on it by multiple people:
hi, tell legal to reply to my email from months ago.
i simply can’t believe you’re thanking anyone “for bringing this to our attention” just because it went viral.
what about all the times i’ve directly contacted you privately about using my work? why should i have to hurt your brand to be heard?
So, we had some unknown outsource companies at fault for plagiarizing previously and now unknown former empleyee? How convenient! Surely the fact that art director and other marathon artists follow her means nothing.
I really wish i could buy that this was actually just an overeager artist who got laid off to pay for pete parsons' 80th classic car but not only is this the 4th time this has happened, joseph cross was following and clearly aware of antireal. yall knew and fully intended on getting away with it
Honestly, at this point the company should be dismantled and the leadership thrown in prison. These corporate edgelords wont learn. They will just overstep, inch by inch and the courts will understate their deeds over and over until there is only one company that rules the world and sell you your fucking liver by the minute.
Dismantle this pile of shit.
🎶 Oops I did it again! 🎶
🎶 I stole your art, added it to my game, ooh baby 🎶
Should have just used AI, at least then people could debate whether or not it was plagiarism
I wasn't expecting quality from modern Bungie but this is definitely an unexpected low
Man, as somebody who grew up with Halo, it's really depressing to see how they seem to just be utterly incapable of an original thought anymore.
I mean is there even a simgle person still working on bungie that was somehow related to the good halos?
Is anyone actually shocked about modern Bungie?
I just assume any art coming out of Bungie is stolen now.
Joseph Cross has probably never made any original artwork, it's all just stolen from other people.
It's definitely a really bad look, but I can imagine how it could have happened.
A former artist or even an outsourced artist probably delivered them a texture sheet of graphics, nobody caught that several of the graphics were plaigerized, the artist never mentioned it, assumed it was purely for a blockout or temporary, maybe they used it during a mood boarding/visual development stage and it got pushed along the pipeline.
Trying to reverse search graphics your artists make for you would probably not be done in the good faith sense, if there wasn't suspicion that it wasn't original anyways? But happening four times seems like a reason to really crack down on that kind of thing for the future ... Bungies management has also constantly had issues too.
Artists use photobashing all the time to develop concepts since timelines push design work faster and faster. Photobashing other artists work is usually an issue but taking images or conepts within creative liberties through sufficient alteration or "transformative" use is typically the move if it was ever done.
I'd call it a management issue. Probably bad oversight of outsourcing, or maybe internally disorganized production. Also text and graphics seems like they'd probably have vetted the designs and someone really tried to pass it off without raising attention somehow ... So I'm guessing outsourced and not an internal employee? Idk.
It's wild that you dorks will up vote preemptive excuse making just because someone took a pleasant tone.
How is Bungie still in business? I loved destiny but after a while of them being so hostile and anti-consumer I just left. Fuck Bungie and fuck whoever works for those ass hats
Is the BlueSky OP here not a native English speaker? Cause, BOY that was tough to follow.
This will be entertaining in their ongoing Red War plagiarism lawsuit.
What art did they steal?
Turns out you can click the link and find out! It links to a very short Bluesky post! Try it out! Lemmy has more than just headlines!
I hear there's this thing called a 'hyperlink' you can click to find out